During the holidays I stumbled about Hyper-V and importing an exported virtual machine from Hyper-V 2008 R2 to Hyper-V 2012. Well, of course, exporting, copying the files onto the new host machine and importing. Sounds easy – and how it´s supposed to work - but the Hyper-V 2012 says “There´s no spoon virtual machine to import”!
The Import Wizard error message says:
“Hyper-V did not find virtual machines to import from location “<path>”.”
Glad that I found a great article about this problem by Rhoderick Milne [MSFT] on TechNet!
Windows Hyper-V 2012 & 8.1 Hyper-V Did Not Find Virtual Machine to Import
The article is really worth to be read! Here´s a short conclusion about the main topics in there:
- “…As you can see, VMs that were exported from Windows Server 2008 & 2008 R2 cannot be imported as-is into Windows Server 2012 R2 or Windows 8.1…”
- On Hyper-V 2008 and Hyper-V 2008 R2 exported VMs can be imported in Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V´s again. But not in 2012.
- If you still have acces to the original Hyper-V 2008 host, get the VM configuration file and use this (my approach, see “Original Hyper-V Server & VMs Available” and below).
- If you don´t have access to the original Hyper-V host, see “Original Hyper-V Server Unavailable”
- Also read How To Import Windows 2008 R2 VM To Windows 2012 or 8.1 Using Boot To VHD.
So, my (simple) solution was: My original Hyper-V 2008 host is still available. Shut down the VM so that it´s stopped and go to the folder where the virtual machine configuration files are stored. In my case this is C:\VPC\Virtual Machines.
Locate the (last) VM configuration file, check if it´s the right one (here work16).
Once you´re sure it´s the right file, copy the file (here "79E8CB8E-6B7F-429B-B70C-8AD0E807435D.xml”) to the new Hyper-V 2012 machine. I copied it to the same directory of the exported VM.
Now, import the VM with the path where the config file is stored.
And – tataaa – now it works!
The rest behaves as expected… reuse the existing VM-ID, locate the existing VHDs (D:\VPC\work16\Virtual Hard Disks\), connect the NIC and so on.
When done, the import action should be look like this summary.
That´s it. Happy importing (again)! 