Today’s IT landscape demands agility and a unified management experience. Migrating virtual machines to Hyper-V shouldn’t involve juggling multiple interfaces. That’s why Windows Admin Center (WAC) and the NetApp Shift Toolkit join forces to deliver a single-pane-of-glass solution that makes VM mobility simple and efficient.
What is NetApp Shift toolkit?
NetApp Shift Toolkit is a free, GUI-based solution that simplifies VM migration across different hypervisors and converts virtual disk formats. It automates the creation and configuration of destination VMs, reduces virtualization costs through VM portability, and supports disk-level conversions for multi-hypervisor environments. It performs a VM inventory first, then converts to Hyper-V (VHDX) format.
What is Windows Admin Center?
Windows Admin Center is a modern, browser-based management tool for Windows Server environments. It provides a unified interface to manage servers, clusters, and virtual machines without requiring additional licensing costs.
With WAC, administrators can:
- Manage Hyper-V hosts and clusters: Create, configure, and monitor clusters for high availability.
- Provision and control virtual machines (VMs): Easily create, start, stop, and configure VMs across multiple hosts.
- Simplify operations: Perform tasks like storage management, networking configuration, and performance monitoring from a single dashboard.
- Extend functionality: Use extensions like NetApp Shift Toolkit for VM migration and disk format conversions.
WAC helps streamline virtualization management, reduce complexity, and improve operational efficiency in on-premises, hybrid, and cloud environments.
Why this integration matters
With this powerful integration, VMs can be seamlessly converted to Hyper-V from the familiar WAC interface. No complex scripts or no manual conversions, just a streamlined workflow that saves time and reduces risk.
- Faster migrations with minimal downtime
- Simplified management through WAC’s intuitive UI
- Enhances cutover speed & operational confidence
- Supports large scale (10s of 1,000s of VMs) migration
- Delivers a superior alternative to slower “copy-through” methods
- No need of additional capacity, optimized storage leveraging NetApp’s enterprise-grade capabilities
The Process Overview
- Install the extension - NetApp Shift Toolkit (Preview) from Available extensions
- Access NetApp Shift Toolkit (Preview) from the "All connections" page within Windows Admin Center
- Add the source and destination site along with the hypervisors
- Create a migration batch by grouping all the required VMs
- Create the mappings via blueprint
- Once the VM preparation is complete, trigger the migration blueprint
- The disk conversion happens in minutes irrespective of the size
- The virtual machines are bought online on Hyper-V
Explore the Complete Walk-through
Prerequisites
- Shift toolkit installed on a virtual machine on a Hyper-V node
- Ensure “Enable WAC extension” option is selected during the installation
- Install NetApp Shift toolkit extension via extension
- Hyper-V hosts configured as standalone hosts or failover cluster
- Hyper-V user account must have administrator privileges
- Hyper-V hosts are network reachable and DNS entries are up-to-date
- Virtual switches should be configured with the appropriate trunking
- Ensure the VMs to be migrated are residing on ONTAP NFS datastores. If they are not, use svmotion to move the VMs for Shift toolkit to perform its magic
- Make sure that the NFS share (used to store the VMs to be converted) and the destination share (used to store the converted VMs) reside on the same volume.
For detailed information about pre-requisites, refer to Hyper-V requirements
Once the pre-requisites are in place, login to Windows Admin Center and add the NetApp Shift toolkit connection.
- Access the “NetApp Shift Toolkit Extension (Preview) extension via “All connections”.
- Click on Add and enter the Shift toolkit endpoint (FQDN or IP address)
- Once added, click the endpoint to access Shift toolkit via Windows Admin Center.
- Login with the default credentials. The first step is to discover and add the source and then the target Hypervisor details (both hypervisors and storage) to Shift toolkit. Configure Hyper-V as the destination hypervisor. To add, click on “Add New Site” and select “Destination”.
For detailed step by step walkthrough, follow ”Configure Shift toolkit”
- Fill in the Destination Hyper-V details
- Hyper-V Standalone or failover cluster manager IP address or FQDN
- Username - username to access (in UPN format: username@domain.com or domain\administrator)
- Password – Password to access Hyper-V host or FCI instance for performing inventory of the resources.
Once done, click “Create Site”
Note: The source and destination storage system should be the same as the disk format conversion happens at the volume level and within the same volume.- Next step is to group the required VMs into their migration groups as resource groups. Shift toolkit resource groups allow to group set of dependent VMs into logical groups that contain their boot orders and boot delays. Select the VMs and also the appropriate workflow:
- Clone based Migration – performs end to end migration of the VM from source hypervisor to destination hypervisor.
- Clone based Conversion – Performs conversion of the disk format to the selected hypervisor type.
- For detailed step by step guide, follow ”Resource Grouping”
- Define the blueprint with appropriate mappings. So, navigate to the “Blueprints” tab and click on “Create New Blueprint”.
- Select Resource Group Details and click on “Continue”
- Once done, select Network Mapping to the appropriate virtual switch. The virtual switches should already be provisioned within Hyper-V.
- Under VM details, select the relevant IP config and related options against each VM including remove VMware tools, retain mac, vLAN override and more.
- For detailed step by step guide, follow ”Blueprints”
- Once the blueprint is created, a prepareVM job is initiated and it automatically runs scripts on the source VMs to prepare them for migration
- After the prepareVM task is successful, “Migrate” option can be exercised. During migrate option, shift toolkit performs a series of steps to convert the disk format and use the converted disk to create virtual machines on Hyper-V host as defined in the blueprint. The steps performed are as follows:
Pre-requisite – The VMs must be turned OFF gracefully as per the planned maintenance time. downtime Power OFF VMs in the protection group – at source
- Delete existing snapshots for all VMs in the blueprint
- Trigger VM snapshots for Blueprint – at source
- Trigger volume snapshot before disk conversion
- Clone and convert VMDK to VHDX format for all VMs
- Power ON VMs in protection group – at target
- Register the networks on each VM
- Remove VMware tools and assign the IP addresses using trigger script or cron job depending on the OS type
The conversion of VMDK to VHDX happens in seconds which makes this approach the fastest of all the options that are available out there for an additional cost. This also significantly reduce VM downtime during migration.
Once the job is complete, the VMs are ready to use and the status of the blueprint changes to “migration Complete”.
For detailed step by step walk-through with examples, follow ”Migrate VMs to Hyper-V using Shift toolkit”
Eliminate costly delta syncs and long VM downtimes
The NetApp Shift Toolkit delivers fast, scalable disk format conversion for businesses of any size. It uses an agentless, header-only approach to convert VMDKs directly within ONTAP storage via FlexClone technology with no data movement and minimal downtime (typically 3–10 minutes).
Planning to migrate virtual machines to Hyper-V? Simply download this free tool and experience how our capabilities make migration seamless and stress-free.
To download, configure, and test the full feature set along with Microsoft Windows Admin Center, start here.
Safe Harbor Statement: Any unreleased services or features referenced in this blog are not currently available and may not be made generally available on time or at all, as may be determined in NetApp’s sole discretion. Any such referenced services or features do not represent promises to deliver, commitments, or obligations of NetApp and may not be incorporated into any contract. Customers should make their purchase decisions based upon services and features that are currently generally available.
