Another day another Hyper-V expierience. This time a good one !!.

After reading Virtual PC guy’s article on the Import and Export feature of Hyper-V I thought I would give this a go. I needed to move 2 Exchange 2007 Servers, one holding the Mailstore Role and the other the Hub Transport Role, from one Hyper-V Server to another. Let me say if you ever need to do this then this way is a MUST.

First shutdown the current Virtual Machine, Select it in the “Virtual Machines” window, then on the right hand side you will see a link that say export. Click that and you will then need to select an Export Path, in my case C:\export. After you click OK a folder will be created inside that export folder and it will be the same name as the Virtual Machine that you are exporting.

After that has completed, you can then copy that folder to the new Hyper-V Server and rather than selecting export we want to select Import Virtual Machine. Make sure you allow enough time for this copy process, it took me a couple of hours to copy 78GB !!!. After selecting Import Virtual Machine you will need to select the actual folder that you copied and not the parent folder. Eg. If you copied the exported folder into a folder called “Import”, then do not select the Import folder, select the folder inside that. In my case inside my Import folder was my virtual machine FHS-MAILSTORE.

NOTE: Be sure to copy the Exported Machine to the location that would want it to be BEFORE you actually do the Import……

After the import has completed (for me about 10sec) fire up the Machine and away you go……….

I now have a fully “Virtual” Microsoft Exchange 2007 Environment. What I can’t wait for is the new Live Migration that will be part of Windows Server 2008 R2…..

Happy Hyper-V ing……