Introducing the vSphere Migration Toolkit

With 2018 coming to a close, I thought I would share a pet project that I’ve thrown a little time into off and on for the past few months.

A good portion of my job in the first half of 2019 will be migrating hundreds of Microsoft Windows workloads from Hyper-V to vSphere. With any change in hypervisor, there are often steps that need to be completed on the VM to ensure proper functionality. My project has been to create a powershell module to facilitate those steps with Windows workloads.

With this 1.0.0 release, the module has three usable cmdlets:

  • Get-IPInfo – Harvests all network settings (any number of NICs, any number of IPs per NIC, and even supports WINS) from a server prior to migration into a CSV file.
  • Set-IPInfo – Injects the network settings collected by Get-IPInfo into the target workload post-migration. The injection leverages VMware Tools, and no network connectivity is required on the target VM! (Shoutout to Luc Dekens for his work on Invoke-VMScriptPlus v2)
  • Convert-SCSItoParavirtual – Converts the SCSI controller of the target VM to paravirtual. Most conversion tools leave the VMs running the LSI Logic SAS controller, but the paravirtual controller is recommended for high IO workloads. (Automates the steps for the Windows boot disk in the VMware KB: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1010398)

The module can be reviewed and downloaded from my Github repo: https://github.com/wmilliron/vSphere-MTK

My hope is for the community to provide feedback on improvements to the existing cmdlets, and also offer up ideas on what other migration steps could be automated. If this project matures, I would like to get it added to the Powershell gallery and add support for other OS families.

Drop me a comment with an idea of how this module can be improved, and what you’d like to see added!

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