Symptoms:

   In some cases, when VMs that need to be replicated contain extremely large amounts of data, an administrator may want to avoid having to Sync the data over the WAN which in some cases may consume valuable Network Resources and take a long time.

In such situations, the relevant volume can be copied to external media, brought to the DR site, added to the remote Datastore, and selected as a "Preseed" of the protected replicating volume.

In a cross platform replication environment where replication is setup from a Microsoft Hyper-v (SCVMM) production environment to a VMware (vCenter) DR environment, and additional procedure is required for converting protected VHD\VHDX disks to VMDKs so as to use them as preseeded disks in the VMware DR site.    

Cause:

   N/A    

Solution:

1. First, convert the VHDX to a VHD according to the following article: 

https://blog.bertvanlangen.com/articles/convert-vhdx-vhd/ 

2. Then convert the VHD to a VMDK: 

- Download the WinImage tool from: 

http://www.winimage.com/download.htm 

- Follow the instructions in the following article to convert the file: 

https://www.mydigitallife.info/how-to-convert-and-import-vhd-to-vmdk-vmware/ 

Please note that the conversion process will output two VMDK files: <chosen_name>.vmdk and <chosen_name>-flat.vmdk 

3. Move the two files into a single dedicated folder and upload the entire folder to your Recovery Datastore. 

4. Subsequently, you should be able to select this VMDK for preseeding.