With the official release of Microsoft’s Hyper-V, I’ll bet that many systems administrators are weighing their options for moving existing VMs to their platform. Fortunately, there are several approaches that will work, each with it’s own blend of pros and cons. My recent SearchServerVirtualization.com article, Migrating from Microsoft Virtual Server to Hyper-V covers the details. From the article:
Birds have the right idea: Why not move to where the weather’s better? Sure, it takes a lot of time, effort and energy to cross entire continents, but the trip is often worth it. The same can be said of platform migrations, as technical advantages may come with potential difficulties. Now that Microsoft’s Hyper-V is finally available as an official, fully-supported platform on Windows Server 2008, many IT managers might be thinking about migration.
If you’ve been standing on the sidelines waiting for the official release of Hyper-V, you no longer have any excuses for waiting to at least deploy it in a test environment. If you’ve been working with the beta and release candidate versions, you’re probably ready to deploy some production virtual machines (VMs) with Microsoft’s latest virtualization product. If your data center environment has an existing investment in Microsoft Virtual Server (MSVS) 2005, this article will help you decide why and how you might want to migrate.
Assuming to decide to make the move, the general process is fairly painless (even if you choose to do it completely manually). Such is the price of keeping up with technology, and I think most administrators will find that they’re much happier after the move to Hyper-V.
