Migrating from eSXi to Hyper-V

In order to transfer a virtual machine from vmware’s eSXI server to Hyper-V we used disk-2-vhd to clone the disk in a vhd. If you are planning to do such a task, make sure you remove the vmware tools *before* you clone the disk cause otherwise the installer will not do it afterwards.

If you couldn’t uninstall the tools (because it’s a production system and you want to test the Hyper-V performance before migrating) then you should at least disable the vmware services. One of these services, tries to upgrade the vmtools during shutdown which leads to a nice blue screen of death. When the virtual machines starts again you should see the following error:

szAppName : winlogon.exe
szAppVer : 0.0.0.0
szModName : VMUpgradeAtShutdownWXP.dll
szModVer : 8.3.7.3827

Some say that you could simply rename the dll located in the %windir%\system32 but the proper solution is to delete the services posting the following commands:

sc delete "VMware Physical Disk Helper Service"
sc delete "VMvss"
sc delete "VMtools"
sc delete "VMUpgradeHelper"

I have also used a tool provided by vmware to do an automatic clean up which is basically an automation of these and these instructions but after that I was not able to start the control panel (explorer was crashing). To fix this, I had to manually locate the vmware folder in Program Files and delete it (after backing it up). This solved the control panel problem.

Hope this helps!