Moving VMs to your Hyper-V Cluster

Ok, so it has been a bit hectic lately, but here`s the blog post covering how to move your VMs from a stand alone Hyper- Server, to your Hyper-V Cluster.

I wrote about my environment in this blog post: http://kristiannese.blogspot.com/2012/04/what-im-going-to-do-next-week-with.html

So, let`s take a look how easy we can achieve this without any downtime.

First, I will stress that all of my Hyper-V servers are domain joined to the same Active Directory Domain. Second, I have enabled Constrained Delegation in Active Directory on my computer objects that have Hyper-V. (This is a requirement for Shared-Nothing Live Migration).

Second, I have enabled Live Migration on my hosts, so that they all can send and receive Live Migration an also specified the networks for this kind of traffic.

1.       On my Stand-alone Hyper-V Server (actually my laptop, with nothing else than a wireless connection to the network – for the sake of magic) I select the VM I want to move to my cluster.

2.       Run through the wizard and specify which Hyper-V server you want to move to, and what you want to move. In my example, I want to move the entire VM with all the related VHD`s and files.

3.       Specify the location. I want to move this VM right into my cluster, so I specify one of the available CSV`s on my Hyper-V node. (I am using a traditional Hyper-V cluster in this example, and not a SMB2 CA File Share).

4.       Click Finish to initiate the migration

If you get an “error” message like this, don`t stress. It`s only Hyper-V telling you that the virtual switch the VM currently is connected to, is not available on the destination node. This means that you can connect your VM to any available virtual switch on the destination, so you can guarantee network connection. This is great, and by the way, you get the same option when you import a VM in Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012. Things are just better in this version!

So I select the proper virtual switch for my VM and complete the wizard once again.

The migration has started.

We can see the progress in Hyper-V Manager.

Note: In this example, my VM is actually powered off. This is not a requirement, so you can Live Migrate the VM if you want.

After the migration has completed, go to Failover Cluster Manager on one of your Hyper-V nodes and configure the VM to be highly available.