How easy is it to migrate from ESXi to Hyper-V?

beanman109

Context: I run the IT for a Catholic College in Australia & our overlords at the Archdiocese have handed down an 11th commandment.

"All onsite servers must now be running Windows Server 2019 or later"

We currently have an ESXi 7 Host running about 8 virtual machines all responsible for various things such as DHCP or our 3CX PBX, we have no secondary server but we do have an onsite NAS with about 6-8TB of space at any given time.

I have about 3 hours total experience with ESXi but I'll have to get this system migrated eventually, would this be an easy task to do with some googling? Or am I better organising another school bake sale to raise money for our MSP to do this & not have to deal with the headache myself? Any insights from anyone who might've dealt with anything similar in the past would be greatly appreciated.

shallow

@beanman109 said: must now be running Windows

Did you remind them they have in-turn sold their souls to Satan?

AuroraZero

Would not touch this with @shallow
's computer. From the description you have one false move and their entire infrastructure goes down.

If you do not know ESXI it can be tricky. Sounds like the last admin knew this and made himself important.

beanman109

@shallow said:

@beanman109 said: must now be running Windows

Did you remind them they have in-turn sold their souls to Satan?

The lord works in strange ways, our whole organisation is pretty heavily tied in w/ O365 & Sharepoint so it makes sense they want us running Server 19, I think it has something to do with Azure ARC IIRC.

@AuroraZero said: Would not touch this with @shallow
's computer. From the description you have one false move and their entire infrastructure goes down.
If you do not know ESXI it can be tricky. Sounds like the last admin knew this and made himself important.

Yeah I did some googling & it looks like it might be a job for our MSP. I'm employed by the Archdiocese to handle the IT at this one college not all 130+ schools thankfully so if things did go sour it's just the one campus affected. The IT infra at the college was setup by the MSP 4 years ago before I even took over, just been working with the legacy ESXi as that's what they left in place.

AuroraZero

Good idea when ESXI goes bad it usually goes really bad. Not too many people using it that I have found.

Hope they have a backup some place because they will likely need it.

webcraft

Since this is a migration away from ESXI, I wouldn't expect too much trouble with ESXi. Hyper-V can be a beast too so, difficult but as long as it's migration only it should be manageable.

AuroraZero

@webcraft said:
Since this is a migration away from ESXI, I wouldn't expect too much trouble with ESXi. Hyper-V can be a beast too so, difficult but as long as it's migration only it should be manageable.

If ESXI decides to shit itself mid migration you will rethink your entire life choices trying to recover.

So don't expect too much trouble and have fun.

Edit: Forgot to add I don't know shit about shit so take any advice I give with a grain of salt.

skorous

@AuroraZero said:

@AuroraZero said:
Good idea when ESXI goes bad it usually goes really bad. Not too many people using it that I have found.

>

Edit: Forgot to add I don't know shit about shit so take any advice I give with a grain of salt.

I was going to ask about that. I'm familiar with "there's lies, damn lies, and then there's statistics" but VMware is still a major player in virtualization. Last time I looked they were still a market leader and dominating Hyper-V.

rcy026

@AuroraZero said:
Good idea when ESXI goes bad it usually goes really bad. Not too many people using it that I have found.

I would not worry about ESXI in this scenario. If you think ESXI is bad, you have not seen a completely fubar Hyper-V. Holy mother of everything virtual, nothing can make a mess of everything the way that Hyper-V can.

Last I checked VMware had something like 75% of the virtualization market, so I would not say that "not too many" people are using it.

beanman109

@rcy026 said: I would not worry about ESXI in this scenario. If you think ESXI is bad, you have not seen a completely fubar Hyper-V. Holy mother of everything virtual, nothing can make a mess of everything the way that Hyper-V can.

On the bright side once it's migrated to HV any fuck ups I make can be fixed by my Employer & Microsoft rather than me having to call the MSP for anything ESXi related.

rcy026

@beanman109 said:

@rcy026 said: I would not worry about ESXI in this scenario. If you think ESXI is bad, you have not seen a completely fubar Hyper-V. Holy mother of everything virtual, nothing can make a mess of everything the way that Hyper-V can.

On the bright side once it's migrated to HV any fuck ups I make can be fixed by my Employer & Microsoft rather than me having to call the MSP for anything ESXi related.

Don't bet on it. I've seen Hyper-V fuckups so bad even Microsoft was unable to fix it.
And honestly, if you cant figure out how to use ESXi, you will not be able to use Hyper-V either.

beanman109

@rcy026 said:

@beanman109 said:

@rcy026 said: I would not worry about ESXI in this scenario. If you think ESXI is bad, you have not seen a completely fubar Hyper-V. Holy mother of everything virtual, nothing can make a mess of everything the way that Hyper-V can.

On the bright side once it's migrated to HV any fuck ups I make can be fixed by my Employer & Microsoft rather than me having to call the MSP for anything ESXi related.

Don't bet on it. I've seen Hyper-V fuckups so bad even Microsoft was unable to fix it.
And honestly, if you cant figure out how to use ESXi, you will not be able to use Hyper-V either.

I've used Hyper-V for a few years prior & have the experience. It's not that I can't figure out ESXi, I just haven't had any reason to touch ESXi here since starting other than running updates, creating a couple VM's & rebooting the node.

rcy026

@beanman109 said:

@rcy026 said:

@beanman109 said:

@rcy026 said: I would not worry about ESXI in this scenario. If you think ESXI is bad, you have not seen a completely fubar Hyper-V. Holy mother of everything virtual, nothing can make a mess of everything the way that Hyper-V can.

On the bright side once it's migrated to HV any fuck ups I make can be fixed by my Employer & Microsoft rather than me having to call the MSP for anything ESXi related.

Don't bet on it. I've seen Hyper-V fuckups so bad even Microsoft was unable to fix it.
And honestly, if you cant figure out how to use ESXi, you will not be able to use Hyper-V either.

I've used Hyper-V for a few years prior & have the experience. It's not that I can't figure out ESXi, I just haven't had any reason to touch ESXi here since starting other than running updates, creating a couple VM's & rebooting the node.

Use whatever gets the job done and you feel comfortable with.
Migrating should not be a problem, there are plenty of ways to convert from vmware to hyper-v images and with only 8 virtual machines you should be able to do it manually.