Question

Is Hyper-V Generation 2 UEFI a showstopper for Production VMs?

  • 9 March 2019
  • 4 replies
  • 1420 views

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  • Voyager
  • 2 replies
I’m planning to move a Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter Edition VM from Hyper-V 2012 R2 to AHV on AOS 5.10.2 today. I have created a similar (but not cloned) test VM in the environment and migrated it yesterday with no issues. UEFI worked fine. Today in my final prep I’m seeing that in newer versions of the Nutanix documentation (AOS 5+) that this migration and VM type (AHV with UEFI) is listed as Limited Support and “Not recommended for Production”.

Is this a showstopper?

Are other customers moving important production Gen 2 UEFI Hyper-V VMs to AHV?

Scenario
Support Level
Generation 2 VM (UEFI) migrated from Hyper-V to AHV
Limited support.
For information about configuring UEFI for VMs migrated from Hyper-V, see Post-Migration Tasks, Windows VMs.
UEFI VM migrated from ESXi to AHV
Not supported
Note: The support levels in the second column are defined as follows:
· Limited support. Nutanix recommends that you not use the configuration in production. You can open a support case, and Nutanix will provide a workaround if one exists. However, no fixes or changes can be made to the product.
· Not supported. The configuration must not be used in production. Nutanix does not support this configuration.

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4 replies

Userlevel 3
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So this month an AOS release will support UEFI (or should) if 5.10.2 doesn't already.

We recently tried migrating using Async replication and it wouldn't recover the VMs because they are UEFI. I would follow up with support for a roadmap, but here shortly it should be fully supported.
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I opened a ticket with Support, described the situation, and they recommended we go forward with the migration assuming we have backups of the source VM and a rollback plan. We do.

They told me that the main issue from their standpoint is VMs not booting after the migration, which is fixed by enabling UEFI on the destination AHV VM. I did that on my test VM and saw no issues at all. He told me that if we have no issues booting the migrating VM, to go forward.

If we do see issues booting the migrated VM, roll back and use the source non-Nutanix Hyper-V VM while we plan a different method or wait for Nutanix to support this scenario.

He would not comment on future releases, supportablity, etc.

Do you agree with this course of action?
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FYI this is an important production VM.
Userlevel 3
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Where I work is is an extremely conservative and risk adverse environment, and of my engineers came to me with this, the first thing I would ask is, "how confident are you in your roll back plan? What is your test plan?".

It sounds like you've got a handle on that, so I see no issue with their suggestion. Test the heck out of it. Reboot it a few times after migration and make sure all is behaving as you'd expect.