VCSA on HyperV

[zao gnom]

Hi everyone

Is there a way to export existing VCSA virtual machine form ESXi host, convert it to VHDX and import it to HyperV?

Best regards

[blazilla]

You can try to export the VCSA as OVF and then import it using the Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter 3.0.

[Kev_Johnson]

It's not supported. Doesn't mean that it can't be done, but I wouldn't do it in production.

[NathanosBlightc]

Why do you want to do this? if you need to manage the VMware infrastructure from the Microsoft virtualization platform, you can do it via the Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) with some limited management procedures (naturally VMware can manage its infrastructure very powerful than the Microsoft solution!)

However, you can deploy the VCSA successfully and convert its VMDK disks to the VHDX disks supported by Hyper-V and then add them to an existing VM inside the Hyper-V server. There are many ways, graphical or PowerShell extension to do this, please look at here

[zao gnom]

Hi Amin Masoudifard

Thank you for your answer.

I know it is not supported method but, I have two ESXi hosts and i don`t want VCSA to be on them.

unfortunately I don`t have third host for another ESXi just for VCSA to be on it, but I do have another Microsoft host with Hyper-v.

So my idea was to export existing VCSA and convert it to Hyper v.

I`ll try your way

best regards

[NathanosBlightc]

I envolved in a similar project like your situation some years ago. They designed to set up the vCenter VM as a Hyper-V and they vindicated their plan like this, if the ESXi hosts failed, they have still access to the vCenter server. I convinced them it's absolutely wrong! because of the following reasons:

1. VMware has many Availability features and technologies (like HA & DRS) to keep the services up and running against many types of disaster/failure. So naturally, it can protect its primary management service (vCenter) too

2. After the release of vSphere 6.5, VMware introduced a very impressive feature for vCenter availability, called VCHA (vCenter High availability). Although it needs to deploy three VMs, Primary VCSA, Passive, and Witness into the three different hosts (you mentioned sadly there exist only 2 physical hosts in your network environment)

3. Using two different platforms of virtualization is not a good design and is not recommended! There is no benefit in these types of design. Using one single platform is the better option and there is more integration.

So I strongly recommend that convert the VM inside the Hyper-V host to the ESXi host and then clean the server and install the 3rd ESXi host and use to in your virtual infrastructure. Regardless of what you do about the 3rd physical server, you can deploy the VCSA (certainly use the appliance mode, not the windows-based) without worry, and remember if you even lose it temporarily, the ESXi hosts and their VMs working correctly.

[tayfundeger]

You cannot install on Hyper-V. This is an unsupported method.

Software Requirements for the vCenter Server Appliance and Platform Services Controller Appliance

[btapps]

Possibly a slightly more elegant solution would be to enable nested virtualisation and run ESXi as a HyperV guest. Then vCenter would probably play nicer, but most likely completely unsupported.

[acomputerguy78]

I don't know if this has been actually answered for you or not, but I actually managed to finish this today. It was a lengthly process and I had to export from a Vsphere using the solarwinds free migration tool, then make some changes in the SSL certs after the import for all the services to start up correctly. Now it is complete and running in a Windows 11 Hyper-V lab environment. Running great and fast.

Hi  

Would you please share your step by step method to accomplish this ?

Thanks

What do you exactly made about this SSL certs? Can you tell me what you did to bring vCenter up and running in Hyper-V? 

[richard612]

For anyone still reading this (five years later) yes it can be done.

I've moved my [lab] VCSA into Hyper-V several weeks ago.