Alchemy —   the art of turning lead into gold.  Fact or fantasy we may never know, but now we can turn VMware Virtual Machines (VMs) into Hyper-V Virtual Machines and VMware Virtual Disks (VMDKs) into Hyper-V Virtual Hard Disks (VHDs) using a free, simple, standalone tool called the Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter (MVMC) that has been available in beta since September 2012.

To be specific, MVMC converts VMware virtual machines created with:

• • VMware vSphere 4.1
• • VMware vSphere 5.0
• • VMware vSphere 4.0 if the host is managed by vCenter 4.1 or vCenter 5.0. You have to connect to vCenter 4.1 or 5.0 through MVMC for virtual machines on vSphere 4.0 to be converted.

Into virtual machines for:

• • Windows Server® 2012 Hyper-V
• • Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012
• • Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Hyper-V
• • Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 SP1

Two versions of this tool are offered, the MVMC Standalone solution (Production Release) and the MVMC Plug-In for VMware vSphere Client Beta both of which are freely available for download, both of which were introduced as part of the Switch to Hyper-V program announced at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference last July.

According to Microsoft MVP Rand Morimoto, president of Convergent Computing, a 65-person technology consulting firm in Walnut Creek, CA:

“Some of the key technologies built in to Windows Server 2012 specific to virtualization that have really resonated with VMware customers are the Hyper-V Shared Nothing Live Migrations and Hyper-V Replica.  In the past, when organizations wanted to “failover” a guest session from one server to another, they used VMware VMotion or Microsoft Live Migration to seamlessly move guest sessions from one host to another.  However, those solutions required high speed network connectivity (10 Gig Ethernet or Fiber), Storage Area Network (SANs), and the host servers configured in a cluster.  Of course, you could skimp on the configurations if you are only moving one session at a time, but still, it required a fair amount of an infrastructure to do real time migrations.  With Windows Server 2012, the servers do not need to be in clusters, you can Live Migrate systems in the middle of the day without interruption to the guest session, you can do the migration on standard network backbones, an incredible solution that comes “in the box” with Windows Server 2012 that requires no special software, license, configuration or tool.  Same with Hyper-V Replica to replicate guest sessions across a WAN.”