Best Tools for Migrating Vmware VMs to other Hypervisors (e.g Hyper V)

After the acquisition of Vmware by Broadcom in late 2023, the good old days of Vmware environments are gone.

Vmware license prices went up (in most cases more than 3 times of what companies used to pay), products have been merged into only two large packages (VVF and VCF), and also Broadcom shows that they are not interested to continue working with smaller VCSP providers in the future.

Many enterprises and IT professionals started looking for ways to migrate away from Vmware to other hypervisors. This is not an easy task but there are several tools available to make your migration from Vmware easier and pain-free (as much as possible).

I have researched several tools that can be used to migrate Virtual Machines from Vmware to other Hypervisors (such as Hyper-v).

My company is a Vmware Cloud Service Provider so we started preparing for such migration and I was interested to see what tools will help us move customers’ VMs to a new virtualization platform.

Here is what I found:

1) Veeam Backup & Replication (Instant Recovery / Live Recovery)

If you are already using Veeam as your backup software, then its Data Portability features offer an excellent way to migrate VMs from Vmware to another platform.

The big picture is that you take backup of VMs on Vmware and then restore/recover these VMs to another supported hypervisor. This essentially offers a great migration path which for many professionals will be a lifesaver.

This approach for migration (i.e using Veeam) is reliable, supports restoration to other hypervisors (e.g Hyper-V) and you can do live/near-live migrations with minimal downtime. Many MSPs and enterprises that already have a license for Veeam will find this option the best approach.

2) StarWind V2V Converter

The second tool I have found to be a very good choice and recommended by many professionals is the V2V converter by starwind.

This is a free and standalone tool that converts one VM at a time by default, but you can run multiple instances to parallelize conversions. Moreover, in an upcoming update of the tool, multi-VM support and automated PowerOff/On of the VMs will be supported as well.

3) Microsoft SCVMM (System Center Virtual Machine Manager)

If you are migrating from Vmware to Hyper-V, then SCVMM can help with moving VMs as well.

This software option is useful when you want bulk/orchestrated conversions and Hyper-V management features, but people report it can be finicky and require extra config.

For example, it requires pre-loading Hyper-V drivers in Linux guests and safe-boot tweaks for Gen2 and also you might need post-migration reconfiguration for NIC and data disk in some cases (e.g if a VM has multiple disks, you will need to configure some additional settings because the extra disks will be offline after the conversion).

The general process requires to add the Vmware vCenter and ESXi hosts under the umbrella of SCVMM management and then you need to convert the VMware VMs to Hyper-V. Note that Vmware uses VMDK file format while Hyper-V uses VHDX file format.

4) Proxmox Import Wizard

If you plan to migrate VMs from Vmware to Proxmox VE, in version 8.1-8 they have introduced a new VM Import Wizard whereby you can import VMware ESXi VMs as a whole.

The key capabilities of this migration tool include the following:

• Imports ESXi VMs as whole VMs with most VM config mapped to Proxmox’s config model.
• Supports live-import (similar to PBS live-restore): you can stop the VM on ESXi and immediately start it on Proxmox while disk data is fetched on demand, reducing downtime.
• Works with ESXi versions tested from 6.5 through 8.0.

5) Cirrus Data

This is another paid commercial tool that can be considered similar to Veeam in terms of automation and speed of migration. It is designed for live, large-scale migrations with automation and has a similar downtime profile to Veeam Live Recovery.

It uses Cirrus Migrate Cloud (CMC) and its intelligent migration features keep production workloads running normally until the final switchover. Of course the devil is in the details so personally I don’t get exited about such claims because I have seen a lot !!

My Personal Recommendation

If you already have Veeam licensed, then use Veeam Live Recovery for the fastest and lowest-risk approach.

The strongest consensus among IT professionals is that Veeam is the most recommended tool/approach for migrating VMware VMs to other hypervisors (use backup + restore, Instant/Live Recovery to minimize downtime).

Now, if you don’t have Veeam already, a free and solid solution is StarWind V2V Converter, running multiple instances in parallel.