> Documentation > End User Access > Command Center > Virtualization > Information for All Virtualized Platforms > Cross-Hypervisor Restores (Virtual Machine Conversion)

Converting to Azure Stack

When restoring a virtual machine from backup, you can choose to restore the VM as an Azure Stack VM.

You can use this feature to migrate virtual machines to Azure Stack.

Source Hypervisors

You can convert VMs to Azure Stack from Azure Resource Manager.

Conversion is not supported from IntelliSnap snap copies.

Before You Begin

  • Azure Standard or Premium general-purpose storage accounts are required for VM conversion to Azure Stack.

  • For Windows computers: enable the pagefile on the C: drive of the source VM. This will prevent you from receiving an error message when you reboot the destination VM.

  • For Linux computers: Ensure that the fstab entry of the source disk should be based on disk UUID and not disk name. If it is not based on disk UUID, then the restored VM will not boot up.

  • To enable deployment in Azure Stack, define one or more resource groups for the application associated with the Azure Stack hypervisor.

  • Configure an Azure Stack hypervisor.

  • For information about the restore options for the Azure Stack destination, see Options for Conversion to Azure Stack.

Azure VM Considerations

  • The VM name can only contain alphanumeric characters or the '-' character; the name cannot contain any Unicode Transformation Format (UTF) characters.

  • Conversion is not supported for virtual machines that use Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) boot methods. A VM that has EFI boot enabled can be restored as an Azure VM, but the resulting VM is not bootable. For successful conversion results, the source VM must boot using BIOS, because Azure does not support Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) or EFI boot methods. The OS volume must use MBR partitioning rather than GPT.

Procedure

  1. From the navigation pane, go to Protect > Virtualization.

    The Virtual machines page appears.

  2. On the Hypervisors tab, click the hypervisor.

    The hypervisor page appears. The VM groups area displays summary information for any existing VM groups.

  3. In the VM groups area, click Restore for the VM group that contains the virtual machine.

  4. In the Select restore type page, select Full virtual machine to restore one or more full virtual machines.

  5. In the Restore page, expand the tree on the left and select the objects to be restored on the right. Select an item or click on an entry in the Name column to browse within an item.

    In the top right corner of the page, a "Showing" message indicates what backup data is being displayed. You can click the down arrow beside this message and select any of the following options:

    • Show latest backups: Only display data for the most recent backups.

    • Show backups as of a specific date: Only display data up to the date you specify.

    • Show backups for a date range: Only display data within the data range you specify.

    The Restore options dialog box appears.

  6. Enter the restore options for the Azure Stack VM.

  7. Click Submit to run the restore job.

Results

If the source VM had dynamic disks that use simple disk spanning, RAID, striped, or mirrored layouts, after VM conversion, the disks in the converted VM might be marked as Failed in Disk Management. You must bring these disks online manually using Disk Management. To bring the disks back online, perform an Import Foreign Disks operation on the guest VM for the disk group that contains failed disks. Import the entire disk group in one operation rather than performing a partial import.

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