Migrate a Windows VM from VMware ESXi to Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) Easily

With the release of Nutanix Move (used to be called Xtract), migrating VM’s from VMware ESXi to AHV is now super simple and the best part of all, automated!

Website Landing Page: https://www.nutanix.com/products/move/

Check out the download portal for Move (still called Xtract on download portal for now): https://portal.nutanix.com/#/page/xtract

*** OLD PROCESS BELOW – REPLACED BY NUTANIX MOVE ***

Moving VM’s from ESXi to the Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) is quite simple. Here are the high-level steps:

• First, install the Nutanix VirtIO package into the VM(’s) you are moving – driver package can be downloaded here: https://s3.amazonaws.com/ntnx-portal/mobility/1.0.1/Nutanix-VirtIO-1.0.1.msi (or find the latest on the http://portal.nutanix.com site)
• Whitelist the subnet (In Prism, Gear icon -> Filesystem Whitelists) so that we can access the Nutanix Distributed Storage Container from any host
• Mount it as an NFS mount (ESX) or as a SMB Shared Path (Hyper-V) on the hypervisor hosts you are coming “from”
• Power-off the Source VM
• Clone or Move (your choice) the Source VM onto the shared storage container
• Create a new VM in Prism and specify CPU, RAM and add a NIC/vLan adapter
• To add a disk, configure it as follows:
  • Type: Disk
  • Operation: Clone from ADSF file
  • Bus Type: SCSI
  • Path: provide the path to the VM’s Flat VMDK file. To see options, type / to start the autocomplete dropdown
• Once VM is configured, power-on and it should boot right up

Here’s also a helpful blog post that shows the above with a video:
http://vmwaremine.com/2015/08/27/migrate-windows-2012r2-server-from-esxi-to-ahv/#sthash.fC2IASXj.UJAlw4ov.dpbs

Hope it helps and happy converting! 😉