I have Vmware ESXi 5.5 Update 1 with two disks, called RAID0 (3.6 TB) and RAID5 (10.9 TB).
I am tired of having to rebuild ESXi every sixty days for home use so I am planning on moving to Hyper-V, but I'm a little nervous. I don't have swing kit, so will have to repurpose my existing 1 year old quite powerful machine (Intel i7 32 Gb RAM two sets of RAID storage internal), 3 NICs. Features I need from VMware are:
- Ability to snapshot and revert to snapshot (running and stopped VM)
- Ability to move VMs between my different storage areas (RAID0 and RAID5)
- Ability to set up internal networks to the Hyper-V host so I can set up virtual labs on their own virtual networks
- USB pass through to the VM
- Auto start VMs with the host.
- Auto shut down VMs with the host.
- Templating of OSs - mainly Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2012 R2, but also Centos 7. Can I convert my ESXi templates to Hyper-V?
- Good performance from both Windows and Linux machines
- Easy management from a workstation on the network.
- Install Hyper-V to USB flash drive plugged in to the server.
Can Hyper-V do all that?
Also, I have a migration plan. Will this work?
- In ESXi move all machines for migration from RAID5 to RAID0 storage.
- Install Hyper-V on the host to USB flash drive (16 GB)
- Format RAID5 storage so it can take vhds. (NTFS?)
- Set up networks - have three NICs on the host.
- Install management software on my workstation
- Convert VMware vmx machines on RAID0 storage to vhd based machines on RAID5 storage. How to do this? My machines vary from v8,9 to vmx10.
- Power on VMs and perform checks.
Any comments? I'm particularly concerned about the conversion process from VMware to Hyper-V and the reliability of it. Total size of VMs to convert is just under 3 TB.