ESXI > HyperV Migration

[Olliedawg]

Hello all - Hope your summer projects are going well!

 

Next week I am planning to migrate our two on prem hosts from ESXi v8.0.3 to Server 2022 Datacentre with HyperV roles. Broadcom can stuff it. I am planning on using Veeam to move the virtual machines across. 

 

This is the first time I've done such a migration. My plan is as follows

 

• Remove VMware Tools from all VM's, power off VM's
• Take fresh incremental backup of all powered off VM's
• Install Server2022 on both hosts, setup & configure HyperV role
• Use Veeam instant recovery to fire the VM's back up from the latest incremental backup
• Re-configure/check backup jobs 

 

If you have done such a task before, I would greatly appreciate any pointers/caveats..

 

TIA!

 

[msi_school]

Are any of these servers DCs?

 

DCs do not like to be restored from back up it would be much better to build a new DC and transfer the roles to it.

[Olliedawg]

1 minute ago, msi_school said:

Are any of these servers DCs?

 

DCs do not like to be restored from back up it would be much better to build a new DC and transfer the roles to it.

Yes two DC's.

 

I would have thought that with the DC's both being powered off, restoring from a fresh offline backup would be ok?

 

I suppose the safer option is to rebuild though, easy enough to transfer roles.

[Davit2005]

Perfectly OK to restore DCs. If you are in DR situation. I've even done it with Backup Exec before now, some years back.

 

Yes you can get issues with sync which is repairable.

 

https://www.veeam.com/kb2119

 

The referenced article does speculate that it does not cover restore of Hyper-V though.

 

To be safe I would rebuild the DC on Hyper-V and then join it to domain, migrate roles then build the 2nd DC on Hyper-V. You can then be sure you have a clean VM without any remains of VMWare.

 

With DCs it is better to be safe than sorry as they can be finicky, I've always jus built new DCs TBH, and with Virtualization there is no need to have any thing else but the DC roles i.e. AD, DNS and DHCP services on a single VM and highly advise against it.

Edited August 12, 2025 by Davit2005

[StephenPink]

As others have said, would spin up new DCs and migrate roles - easy enough to do and so not worth any potential weirdness from trying to restore/convert.

 

Also - when restoring from Veeam does that handle the conversion? E.g the vmdk to vhdx type stuff

[Olliedawg]

19 hours ago, StephenPink said:

As others have said, would spin up new DCs and migrate roles - easy enough to do and so not worth any potential weirdness from trying to restore/convert.

 

Also - when restoring from Veeam does that handle the conversion? E.g the vmdk to vhdx type stuff

 

From what I've read it does, you can just use the "instant restore" feature & it does all the work for you.

 

Following from everyone's advice on here, I'll spin up some new DC's & just backup/restore all other VM's🙂

[StephenPink]

18 minutes ago, Olliedawg said:

 

From what I've read it does, you can just use the "instant restore" feature & it does all the work for you.

 

Following from everyone's advice on here, I'll spin up some new DC's & just backup/restore all other VM's🙂

Nice that's pretty cool if it does! Didn't know that  

Good luck and let us know how it all goes