Conversion from VMware ESXi to Microsoft Hyper-V

I think it is time for my yearly blog post. I've been meaning to post something about Microsoft Hyper-v for quite some time now.
When I started at my current position we were running mostly physical servers, but we had a couple of virtual servers running on Microsoft Virtual Server 2005. One of the first things I helped with was to get those virtual servers migrated to VMware Server 2.0. After running on VMware Server for a year or so, we realized that it just wasn't going to fill our needs. It had not been updated for a very long time and it appeared that VMware was going to drop support for it. We then decided to migrate to VMware ESXi. It was a very good product for us. The performance of our virtual machines definitely improved significantly. However, just after getting everything migrated over and running smoothly, the state of Utah dropped their contract with VMware. We made the decision to migrate to Hyper-V.
In all honesty, we struggled in our test conversions from ESXi to Hyper-V. System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 looked to have all of the functionality we needed to perform the conversions built in to it. In all of our test conversions the process would make it to 90% or so and then fail with a cryptic error message.
Finally, we decided to give up on the built-in functionality and use VMware Converter. We shut down the virtual machine we were trying to convert and exported the ESXi VM to a VMware Workstation VM. After that it wasn't a problem at all to import the VMware Workstation VM into System Center Virtual Machine Manager and get it up and running. The process was very smooth once we followed the VMware Converter workflow. Every VM converted and imported just fine.
I was reluctant to move to Hyper-V, but we are very pleased with it. The one item that completely blew me away is how much better Microsoft's backup solution is. We were using the built-in VMware Data Protection product before. It was very unreliable for us. The worst part is that restore operations would take hours. Now we are using Microsoft's System Center Data Protection Manager. It is much more intuitive and restoring a complete VM takes only a matter of minutes.
Microsoft, you've earned one more fan here with Hyper-V.