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While System Center Essentials 2010 supports management of Microsoft server virtualization technologies, including Virtual Server 2005 R2 and Hyper-V (all flavors RTM to R2), it does not support management of VMware hosts (ESX or vSphere servers)...VMware guest OS can be managed via Essentials agent. This leaves one option – V2V conversion. This is a surprisingly easy task in Essentials 2010, and consists of 3 steps, all of which are detailed in the System Center Essentials 2010 Operations Guide, which can be downloaded from connect.microsoft.com.
While Essentials hides this in the Import Virtual Machine wizard, make no mistake – this is V2V conversion. Since Essentials 2010 leverages VMM 2008 R2 for virtualization management, this is not a problem. This functionality is part of VMM already.
High Level Steps
- Power down your VMware guest and copy to Essentials Library Share
- Launch the Import Virtual Machine wizard
- Select your VMware guest from the list of Virtual Machines
Test Details and Results
The result? Success on the first try. While I am not always happy with the level of simplification within Essentials, this is one area where the team is making good progress in providing a simple process in spite of the complex enterprise technologies beneath...
I used a 15GB Windows 2003 64-bit guest. I actually used a VMware template and renamed the .vmxt file with a .vmx extension. I was pleased to see this did not bother Essentials at all. Not only was the the conversion successful, it was pretty fast.Here's a snapshot of job detail from Virtual Machine Manager.
You can see the end-to-end process including conversion of the vmdk (VMware's virtual hard disk format) to VHD and V2V conversion right around 11 minutes.
Conclusion
To our mid-market IT friends and consultants advising this audience, I say there is a lot to like about Essentials 2010. Give it try! You can download a copy of the Essentials 2010 RC at www.microsoft.com/sce