- The most important consideration is transferring the VHD files from the old server to the new one. I was upgrading the hardware that the VM’s were running on, so I needed to transfer the VM’s onto a USB hard drive, upgrade the server and move them back.
There are a couple of things to consider. Firstly, large VM’s take AGES to move! So be prepared to sit an wait a long time. Secondly, ensure you have multiple copies of the VM’s. I had a VM become corrupted on a USB drive and it was just luck that I had another copy on my PC.

- Remember to enable DEP (called a bunch of different things in different BIOS versions) in your servers BIOS. Hyper-V will install successfully and you can start to import VM’s – however they won’t start until you have enabled DEP.

- You need to start any Server 2008 VM’s with a Legacy NIC. This is for a couple of reasons: 1. You need to update the HAL on the VM before Server 2008 will recognize the new hardware. 2. You will have access to the VM remote connection via Hyper-V manager but as the VM tools aren’t installed yet you won’t have mouse access to enable the HAL lookup. The only way around these is to start the VM with a Legacy NIC and then run the HAL & VM tools.

- Don’t use VMM to import the VHD files. VMM creates a copy of the VM’s and takes a long time to process. Import the VM’s via the basic Hyper-V manager and then configure the extra settings via VMM.

- Double check the CPU settings. This is important as one of the migrated VM’s was set to use a maximum 25% of a CPU and the server was really slow. It must have just brought across a strange setting from Virtual Server 05.

- Finally, ensure you run Windows Updates on your VM’s after the move. There are a couple of updates that improve the performance of Hyper-V.

I’ve just completed the migration, so if you have any questions regarding the process feel free to add some comments.

“Exchange 2007 cannot be used with the version of Windows operating system running on this computer”

To install Exchange 2007 on a Windows Server 2008 machine you need to run the installer for Exchange 2007 SP1. You can find a download of the Service Pack below (841MB)

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=44C66AD6-F185-4A1D-A9AB-473C1188954C&displaylang=en