Talking about HOWTO: Convert from VMWare (.VMDK) to Microsoft’s Virtualization format (.VHD)

Posted on by wooway

 

Quote

HOWTO: Convert from VMWare (.VMDK) to Microsoft’s Virtualization format (.VHD)

There’s an interesting set of tools available at http://vmtoolkit.com/.  Here’s a brief description of each of them:

  1. VMDK to VHD Converter
    This is a tool that will convert the virtualized hard drives from VMWare’s format (VMDK) to Microsoft’s Virtual disk format (VHD) so that you can run virtual machines originally created for use with VMWare to run in Virtual Server 2005/R2, Virtual PC 2004/2007, and assumedly Microsoft Virtualization Hypervisor (the virtualization layer to be used with Windows Server Longhorn), which has been touted as using the exact same format as existing Microsoft virtual machine technology.

    One VERY interesting use of this tool has been to leverage VMWare’s Physical-to-Virtual (P2V) tools to virtualize existing servers, then convert the virtualized hard disks to .VHD format for use in Virtual Server R2.  Why would you want to do that?  Well, simply because there’s no cost associated with using Virtual Server:  Virtual Server has no licensing fees associated with it, unlike VMWare ESX, which makes it the perfect environment for infrastructure testing labs, software development environments, and web application farms.

    And of course, it positions an organization very well to take advantage of the highly performant Microsoft Hypervisor, coming with Windows Server Longhorn.

    DOWNLOAD:  http://vmtoolkit.com/blogs/announcements/archive/2006/11/20/vmdk-to-vhd-converter-available.aspx
    (Requires .NET Framework 2.0)

  2. VHD Resizer
    This tool will resize your virtual machine hard drive files (VHD) and also allow you to convert them between Fixed and Dynamic file types by essentially doing a sector-by-sector copy from one type to another. 

    They originally called the tool the "VHD Expander" but soon discovered that they could actually shrink the size of the .VHD file if the partition size of your .VHD didn’t actually take up the entire disk, so they renamed it to the "VHD Resizer" to fit it’s ability to both expand and contract the size of the file.

    DOWNLOAD:  http://vmtoolkit.com/blogs/announcements/archive/2007/02/28/vhd-expander-is-now-vhd-resizer.aspx
    (Requires .NET Framework 2.0)