Migrating Hyper-V VMs to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)

📌 Overview

Migrating on-premises workloads to the cloud requires an efficient, repeatable strategy. In this hands-on project, we took an existing Hyper-V Virtual Machine, exported/backed up its virtual disks, converted the storage format into VMDK, uploaded it to OCI Object Storage, and provisioned a running cloud instance from it.

🚀 Phase 1: Hyper-V Backup & Disk Export

Before modifying or converting disk images, the first rule of infrastructure engineering is securing a clean restore point.

• Step 1.1: Shut Down Workload safely: Ensure the source Hyper-V VM is cleanly powered off to avoid filesystem inconsistency or corrupt database states.
• Step 1.2: Export VHDX: Export the target VM disk image (.vhdx file) from Hyper-V Manager to a dedicated staging directory.

Figure 1: Exporting the source VHDX disk from Hyper-V Manager.

🔄 Phase 2: Converting VHDX to VMDK Format

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure supports importing custom disk images in VMDK or QCOW2 formats. We converted the .vhdx file using qemu-img (or V2V Converter).

# Converting VHDX image to VMDK format using qemu-img
qemu-img convert -f vhdx -O vmdk source_disk.vhdx converted_disk.vmdk -p

• Check Integrity: Verify the converted .vmdk disk size and headers before uploading.

Figure 2: Converting disk formats and verifying image structure.

☁️ Phase 3: Uploading to OCI Object Storage

With the VMDK prepared, the image is staged inside an OCI Object Storage Bucket using the OCI CLI or OCI Console.

• Step 3.1: Create OCI Bucket: Set up a private Object Storage bucket in your target region.
• Step 3.2: Upload Disk Image: Transfer the converted converted_disk.vmdk file into the bucket.

# Uploading VMDK to OCI Object Storage Bucket
oci os object put -bn migration-bucket --name converted_disk.vmdk --file converted_disk.vmdk --progress

Figure 3: Staging the VMDK image inside OCI Object Storage.

🖥️ Phase 4: Import Custom Image & Provision VM

The final step is registering the uploaded object as an OCI Custom Image and launching a live compute instance.

• Import Custom Image: In the OCI Console, navigate to Compute → Custom Images → Import Image. Select the VMDK object from your bucket and set the operating system mode (Emulated / Paravirtualized).
• Launch Compute Instance: Once the image state reaches AVAILABLE, click Create Instance, configure networking (VCN / Subnet), select shape, and launch.
• Verify Connectivity: Test SSH/RDP access to ensure bootloader and drivers loaded smoothly.

Figure 4: Successfully deployed OCI compute instance running from custom VMDK.

💡 Key Takeaways & Lessons Learned