Rather than using the VM names for files, Hyper-V uses a GUID (globally unique identifier) for VM files. VMDK is currently at version 3, with enhancements that allow for VMDK files up to 62 TB, although some management features are limited to smaller files. VMware released VMDK as an open format, and other hypervisors such as Oracle’s VirtualBox and KVM on Linux provide varying levels of support for VM images in VMDK format. Generated by hypervisor if system is suspended

The files used in VMware 6.7 have names that correspond to the VM name followed by the following prefixes:Īdditional VM configuration, backwards compatible with VMware Workstation

vmdk extensions, but VMware uses additional files to store configuration data, backups and swap space.

In this post we’ll take a look at the VM file formats used by both VMware and Hyper-V and the methods provided by VMware and Hyper-V that can be used to convert between them. And, of course, you will need to maintain both the original VM and the migrated VM until you’ve verified that the migrated VM is completely functional. If you are “hot” converting a live VM, then additional time will be needed to synchronize any changes that have occurred during the time the conversion was being done. Additionally, VM image files can be very large, and take a significant amount of time to convert. To move to a new hypervisor platform the VM’s files need to be converted from their existing format to a format usable by the new hypervisor – a “virtual to virtual” or V2V conversion. However, moving to a different hypervisor is a more complex proposition. Moving a VM to a different host using the same hypervisor is accomplished by pointing the new host to the VM’s files. Some of the files hold an image of the VM, while other files provide details about how the VM should be implemented. Virtual machines (VM) are made up of a set of files in a format specific to the hypervisor on which they are running. In this post we’ll focus on another important step: migrating VMs from one platform to another. One step in migrating between VMware and Hyper-V is to reproduce management features, as we discussed in our post on converting from VMware High Availability to Hyper-V’s Failover Clustering.

Convert vhd to vmx