I’ve been using Windows 8 for more than a year, but only in a virtual machine running in VMware workstation. Recently I have been using my laptop in a dual-boot configuration, which works but confuses the Windows 7 disk which always requires a disk check on booting. I finally have a licensed Windows 8.1 as my primary OS (still in dual boot) which I can use to migrate my lab from VMware Workstation to Hyper-V.

Now VMware workstation is a fantastic product and has Hyper-V is not quite up to the same level yet. However, Hyper-V has one big advantage on Windows 8.1: it is free with the operating system. so the task begins to migrate VMware to Hyper-V. I have several Windows Servers which form a lab for CBT nuggets as well as some Linux and Centos hosts and some legacy laptops which I have P2Vd.

The logical place to start seems to be to download and install the Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter 3.0. However, this is taking a wrong turn at Albuquerque. The converter downloads and installs fine. But it is a server product which converts machines from an ESXi server to a Hyper-V host running Windows Server.

The disk2vhd from sysinternals would seem like another option but no, it will not read vmdks that I can see. It might just be the case that I have to backup my VMs and restore them. A common result in search is http://www.starwindsoftware.com/converter. I will investigate this and report in the next post.