Microsoft announces VM Conversion tool

Although Microsoft Azure offers a managed environment hosted on the cloud with many pay-as-you-go (PAYG) services, there are many organizations which prefer to keep their data on-premise because of compliance or data governance reasons. To cater to this use-case and its users, Microsoft has now announced the public preview of a VM Conversion tool.

The VM Conversion utility can be leveraged as an extension in the Windows Admin Center. It specializes in converting VMware virtual machines to Windows Server with Hyper-V. It does this by forming a connection to the virtualization environment in an agentless manner, and begins replicating data from the source without any interruption or downtime. Then, the source VM is powered down after user consent, and data is moved to the target host.

Microsoft has boasted that up to 10 VMs can be migrated at a time within a few minutes, with BIOS-based VMs automatically mapped to Generation 1, and UEFI-based VMs mapped to Generation 2, while maintaining boot configurations. VM Conversion also supports multiple hard disks and the migration of both Windows and Linux guest VMs.

The Redmond tech firm says that all of this is accomplished by first performing prechecks that validate critical components and configurations of the guest VM. Any issues found during this process have to be manually fixed by IT admins. Then, VM Conversion leverages change block tracking (CBT) to create a replica of the source, while ensuring that the source remains operational, and once it is being powered down, another replication pass takes place which captures the delta changes between the first replica and the powered-down state, and carries over those changes too.

Of course, there are lots of other technical details too, which you can read about here. But do keep in mind that the extension is completely free and can be installed inside the Windows Admin Center.