Best Practices before VM migration from ESXi/VMware

[mr_vaughn]

Hi All

I am looking for a check list on what to do to the source VM before conversion to Hyper-V.

We have many VM's and almost all of them are tune with using the following VM hardware configurations.
Source ESXi VM's
* OS - Windows 2016 & higher
* Controller - Paravirtual SCSI
* Disks - Mostly thick provisioned
* NIC -VMXNET3
* VMTools 12.x.x

Questions.
1. I saw we should be removing VMTools before the conversion. Yes?
2. Do we have to remove the PVSCSI & VMNET3 hardware before the conversion and load the LSI SAS & E1000 nic?
3. Are the mac address and nic type/order preserved?
4. I know it is safer in powering off the VM before conversion. Any Apps/Roles to stay away for online conversion? ( I typically do offline DC's, DB's servers)
5. Speed of conversion. I am trying to have the fastest speeds in doing the job. We have a 10Gb nic end to end and using converter we only get avg 950Mbs with peak @ 1.2Gb on 10Gb link. Using a file download of same VMDK via Edge from ESXi web GUI we get 2Gb's. Seems our source disk reads speeds are then maxed out. This is writing to destination SSD. 10Gb NIC has Jumbo frames 9000 enabled and confirm there is no fragmentation on the frames.

[mr_vaughn]

Further on this.
If I do start another starwind conversion in another GUI window the network throughput goes up double.
So it seems the speed per conversion is 1Gb/s

I wonder if there limitations in process throughput?

[yaroslav (staff)]

Welcome to StarWind Forum and thanks for your questions!

1. I saw we should be removing VMTools before the conversion. Yes?
2. Do we have to remove the PVSCSI & VMNET3 hardware before the conversion and load the LSI SAS & E1000 nic?

Only if the VMs do not boot up after conversion (applies only to the OS disks).

3. Are the mac address and nic type/order preserved?

Should be. You can always set the static MAC in the hypervisor, though.

4. I know it is safer in powering off the VM before conversion. Any Apps/Roles to stay away for online conversion? ( I typically do offline DC's, DB's servers)

The source VM is not powered off once the destination is ready (destination does not start up automatically). That's the only thing you need to watch out for, AFAIK.

5. Speed of conversion.

It depends on the source and destination storage too. Also, V2V Converter is a single-threaded app, so conversion speeds might not be too fast.
As a workaround, start multiple conversions at a time.

[mr_vaughn]

So in some testing.
ESXi VM with PVSCSI on source VM as only controller for only 1 VMDK for C:\ does migrate.
Some others in same configuration do not.
So strange.
I can boot into OS repair mode. use disk part and assign a C: drive and execute chkdsk on C: and file systems is good.
I did note that there is no SATA Controller and no CD-ROM but on my test VM I replicated that and the Test VM works still. in conversion.

[mr_vaughn]

So in some testing.
ESXi VM with PVSCSI on source VM as only controller for only 1 VMDK for C:\ does migrate.
Some others in same configuration do not.
So strange.
I can boot into OS repair mode. use disk part and assign a C: drive and execute chkdsk on C: and file systems is good.
I did note that there is no SATA Controller and no CD-ROM but on my test VM I replicated that and the Test VM works still. in conversion.

[yaroslav (staff)]

Thanks for sharing! Check this out https://www.erniecosta.com/2020/02/26/h ... t-drivers/.
As a side note, StarWind V2V transfers the data between VM formats. If the data is there but the OS does not start, there can be a driver mismatch: any other solution e.g., Veeam Instant recovery, or any other competitive solution is likely to lead to the same result.