With many customers now choosing to purchase their Nutanix cluster and go with the purpose built AHV hyper-visor at no extra cost I am tasked with putting together migration plans from ESXi , Hyper-V etc..  We have a number of options, depending if the customer can experience downtime or not and if there are too many costs for live migration.

In this blog I want to walk you through how easy Nutanix have made this process with improved image service available in 5.03.

When I asked this question this week if I could complete this task there was various information out there and not all of it was positive, some complex workarounds seemed to be workable. I’m glad to report I completed several migrations this week and created a simplified plan for the customer, which I thought I would share in a blog.

The process does require down time and depending on the size of the VM for the length of time.  I was averaging a 100GB VM completely converted in approx one hour with the new VM running.

Step 1 – Create a migration container on AHV, this is only required for the duration of the migration.

Step 2 – We need to grant your Server Hosts access to the nutanix container you just created.

 

Select actions

Select Filesystem Whitelists

You need to pick individual hosts or a subnet of hosts that you want to access the container

For single IP enter x.x.x.x/x.x.x.x

Select add

Step 3 – make sure you have no Hyper-V snapshots hanging around.

Step 4 – Install Nutanix VirtIO drivers

Select and install the Nutanix-VirtIO drivers, please check Nutanix.com for latest drivers

Select Install and complete installation.

Step 5 –  Check the location where the VHD /VHDX of the VM is stored from Hyper-V manager

Note:  Make sure you delete any snapshots from Hyper-V manager as the image service will not convert the VHD/VHDX file as the snap needs to be merged so that all data is in the one file.

Step 6 –  Shutdown the VM

Step 7 – RDP to the Hyper-V host

Step 9 – Map to the file share of the container \\cluster_name\container_name

Step 10 – Copy the VHD / VHDX file to the container using copy and past function

Step 11 – Use Image service to trans-code the file

Select actions

Select Image Configuration

Select Upload Image

 

Enter a Name

Select IMAGE TYPE = DISK

Select a container not the migration container

Enter IMAGE Source =nfs://127.0.0.1/migration/VM_name.vhd or vhdx

Select save

When completed you will have server name and disk state will be active.

Step 12 – Create a new VM as normal, at this point you can up the memory and CPU count if required as you will need to re register windows. When it comes to adding the disk see below

 

Select :

TYPE = DISK

OPERATION = Clone from image service

BUS TYPE = SCSI

IMAGE = the image you just created from image service

Select ADD

Step 13 – Start the VM

Step 14 – Remove the Hyper-V NIC and assign correct IP

If you have multiple disks for a VM you need to do each one in turn and attach them n the correct order