Migrating physical Linux servers to Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor virtual environment

Everything is ambiguous in the scheme of migration of physical Linux servers to the virtual environment of the Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor, however, without trying to talk unequivocally about this difficult.

In the continuation of the "languid attempts of Linux P2V-conversion for Hyper-V" (Andrew Ivashentseva, http://bit.ly/hzaV6L ). There is no definitive solution for such migration on the Internet, the main options have been known for a long time:

1. Linux -> Vmware Converter 4 -> Vmware ESX -> VMDK2VHD -> Hyper-V -> Installing LinuxIC
2. Alternative solutions:
   
   1. PlateSpin® Migrate (owned by Novell, formerly Invirtus Enterprise VM Converter),
   2. Quest® vConverter (formerly Vizioncore),
   3. Citrix XenConvert (but here without intermediate migration to VMware you will not manage).
   
   
3. Installing Linux directly into Hyper-V and migrating data and configuration using Linux is also very interesting.
4. Perhaps there is something else, I will be glad if someone shares this knowledge.

Hyper V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager do not know how to migrate Linux P2V, which does not prevent them from virtualizing it quite successfully, there are hyper-v integration tools for Linux - LinuxIC.
The task I was trying to solve was: freeing outdated equipment running Oracle databases, spinning it all under Fedora and transferring virtual machines to our Hyper-V hypervisor.

I went on the famous path number one of my list. The migration consists of the following steps; it is assumed that you already have Windows Server 2008 installed with Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager:

1. Install Vmware Converter on a Windows machine.
2. Install Vmware ESXi. Configure SSH access.
3. Migration process in ESXi.
4. Copy VMDK from ESXi to Hyper-V server over SSH using Winscp.
5. Adding a folder with vmware files to the SCVMM library, and converting V2V (VMDK to VHD using the SCVMM Wizard).
6. Check and run your Linux server on Hyper-V.
7. Integration of LinuxIC components.

Vmware Converter is needed only during migration to VMware, it’s good if there is a high-speed Ethernet adapter. You can immediately try the ability to migrate your Linux server by starting the migration and specifying data with root access, and clicking View source details.




From now on, you will understand that you need Vmware ESXi for migration, it is free to download and use. There is also a 60-day period to manage it through the vSphere Client. I put on the first PC with a processor that supports virtualization hardware. There is no point in describing the installation of Vmware ESXi, there is nothing there that would cause difficulties (next - next –next). Just in case, here is the link to the installation guide (http://bit.ly/frcqdD). The only thing you need to consider is this: there should be enough hard disk space for the data of your migrated servers. You also need to configure remote SSH access, as indicated in the screenshot.
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The Vmware Converter wizard starts the p2v migration, it took me about an hour with 140 Gb of data from one of the servers.


The next step is to download, for example Winscp, to download the necessary files via SSH after the migration is completed.



In System Center Virtual Machine Manager we add a folder with an image from Vmware, all the files that I pulled out of Vmware ESXi over SSH.


Having added everything, we create the task of migration of V2V to SCVMM.



Again, we expect, because I deployed the machine on a server that is only the host of Hyper-V, and SCVMM is on a separate machine - the process took about one and a half hours.



In the end, I got a working machine under Linux Fedora under Hyper-V



I didn’t need the integration of Hyper-V, the machines will sleep and wait for an hour when they are needed.
In addition, I can say that you can do without SCVMM, a free tool: VMDK2VHD ( http://bit.ly/i2IuaT )