Had a client that decided not to take our recommendation of moving from an older version of vmware to the latest and greatest vmware on new hardware. Instead, they purchased whatever hardware and software they wanted from another vendor, and asked us to configure and migrate their entire domain (14+ servers) from the existing vmware environment to Hyper-V. Following will be my notes of what worked, maybe with a dash of what didn’t (even though I have tried to erase those moments from my memory). I will also include other pages that I referenced throughout….or a listing of them…I’m not sure yet… So to start, The Client (heretofore referred to as “The Client”), purchased the following

• 2 HP DL380 Servers, each with 4 onboard NICs and 4 NICs on an expansion card, with dual power supplies
• 2 Cisco SMB switches (I didn’t do much with the configuration of these, so that’s probably not the correct terminology)
• 1 ESX iSCSI SAN, with 1 DAE. this included approximately 4.5 TB in the main enclosure on SATA drives, and another couple TB on SAS drives in the DAE.
• Hyper-V and Windows Server 2012

Theoretically, the initial game plan was to:

1. Store everything in a datastore on the SAN that was in a RAID5 configuration
2. Break the server NICs into teams of two for failover and breaking out the SAN connection from the regular network connection
3. Use System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) to configure and migrate all of the machines

Seems simple right? Exactly. The posts following this one will go into detail on the following steps

• Configuring datastores for Hyper-V storage, with a special note that two servers CANNOT connect to the same datastore
• Setting up NIC teaming in **Hyper-V Manager**
• Setting up the virtual switches in SCVMM
• Testing the V2V process before the actual migration, including details on special considerations moving from Vmware to Hyper-V
• Ensuring that your test environment is the same as the live migration environment (special appearance by Domain vs. Workgroup and Knowing your Network)

Seeing as I have been planning on writing this up since the migration which was 3+ Months ago, only time will tell when the follow up detailed posts will appear.