Converting the SharePoint and Office 2010 Information Worker Virtual Machines to VMWare from Hyper-V

I had a problem. My laptop (my main computer), runs Windows 7. The 2010 Information Worker (RTM) virtual images are Hyper-V. I run all of my development images off of (2) 1TB external ESATA 7200RPM drives using VMWare Player, since Virtual PC is no longer useful for the most part.

So, a few months ago, I started poking around, to see what the options were out there for converting Hyper-V images to VMWare… the pickings were thin. I had some conversations at SharePoint Saturday DC with Ken Price about the issue, as he had the same issue as I did. I pinged him yesterday on twitter to see if he had come up with any leads – and it appears he did.

So, I took that as my challenge, to set out and see if this works. See… I am working with a group of people on a new book (waiting on contract stuff now, so, I’ll spare the details until everything is confirmed), and our plan is to use this IW image as our base for examples and screenshots, etc., to have a consistent feel throughout the book, as we’re all taking on different chapters.

So, first things first, I downloaded the Information Worker Virtual Images, both the front-end server with SharePoint and Office (2010-7a) and the backend server (2010-7b) with Exchange 2010 from here: http://go.gvaro.net/a6P7ec [Editor’s note: Can I just plug Verizon FiOS for giving me a sweet connection with 25Mb/s download speeds?]

Once I downloaded those images, I ran the executable files for each image to join the +/- 700MB rar file slices, 2010-7a.part01.exe and 2010-7b.part01.exe.

Once that was done, I downloaded and fired up WinImage, which is very simple to operate, see the screenshot walk-through below…

Go to Disk >Convert Virtual Hard Disk Image

Select the 2010-7a VHD first located in the Virtual Hard Disks folder

Set the disk to either be a fixed disk, or a dynamically expanding disk

Then select the converted VMDK name to use (the one seen there is from my initial conversion, you will not see that) but, to keep things simple, just name the output file 2010-7a.vmdk.

And then let it do it’s thing. Repeat the same steps for the 2010-7b.vhd as well, if you also want to run exchange as well.

Ok, we then need to create the VMX files (the VMWare virtual machine configuration files)… to do so, I first copied one over by hand, but, that just lead me to BSOD after BSOD when booting up, so, I did a quick search, and found VMX Builder, a free utility from PowerWF. This however complained that I did not have a license to perform this action, which makes no sense, as it is a FREE program. So, off I went looking for something else… and found a web-based approach called EasyVMX! With such enthusiasm in the name, I had to check it out.

I went with EasyVMX v 2.0 (on the right), as it offered the most flexibility.

I then configured my VM as shown below in the following screenshots

In the image above – disconnect the parallel port and serial port if you’d like, it’ll save you some yes/no error prompts when starting up the VM later…

I then downloaded the VM from the ZIP contained above, and opened it, and copied out the VMX files that was created, and pasted that into the folder with our converted 2010-7a VMDK

I then changed the configuration around slightly, to point to the VMDK that we converted, as well as the image name, as shown below [click to enlarge] in Beyond Compare.

 

Then, we can now add the machine into VMWare Player.

I then edit the VMWare Machine Settings to change the RAM to 4096

And reconnecting the Network to connect at power-on, and to replicate the physical machine state

Now, time to flush out a few configuration differences from the EasyVMX generated configuration, I answered No to all of the following pop-up questions (see note above when using EasyVMX configuration on avoiding these)

AND HOLY MOLY! IT WORKS!

So, that is how you can convert a Hyper-V image to VMWare, especially in the case of the 2010 Information Worker Demonstration Virtual Machine(s). I hope this helps! This allowed me to then send the following tweet back to Ken Price…

This here would be that blog post 🙂

 

Technorati Tags: SharePoint 2010,Information Worker,2010 Information Worker Demonstration and Evaluation Virtual Machine (RTM),2010 IW Demo VM,EasyVMX,VMX,VHD,VMDK,VMC,Virtual Image,Virtual Machine,Virtual PC,Hyper-V,VMWare Player,SharePoint Server 2010,Exchange 2010