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Table Of Contents
Migration with Storage vMotion
With Storage vMotion, you can migrate a virtual machine and its disk les from one datastore to another
while the virtual machine is running. With Storage vMotion, you can move virtual machines o of arrays for
maintenance or to upgrade. You also have the exibility to optimize disks for performance, or to transform
disk types, which you can use to reclaim space.
You can choose to place the virtual machine and all its disks in a single location, or select separate locations
for the virtual machine conguration le and each virtual disk. The virtual machine does not change
execution host during a migration with Storage vMotion.
During a migration with Storage vMotion, you can change the disk provisioning type.
Migration with Storage vMotion changes virtual machine les on the destination datastore to match the
inventory name of the virtual machine. The migration renames all virtual disk, conguration, snapshot,
and .nvram les. If the new names exceed the maximum lename length, the migration does not succeed.
Storage vMotion has several uses in administering virtual infrastructure, including the following examples
of use.
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Storage maintenance and reconguration. You can use Storage vMotion to move virtual machines o of
a storage device to allow maintenance or reconguration of the storage device without virtual machine
downtime.
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Redistributing storage load. You can use Storage vMotion to manually redistribute virtual machines or
virtual disks to dierent storage volumes to balance capacity or improve performance.
Storage vMotion Requirements and Limitations
A virtual machine and its host must meet resource and conguration requirements for the virtual machine
disks to be migrated with Storage vMotion.
Storage vMotion is subject to the following requirements and limitations:
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Virtual machine disks must be in persistent mode or be raw device mappings (RDMs). For virtual
compatibility mode RDMs, you can migrate the mapping le or convert to thick-provisioned or thin-
provisioned disks during migration if the destination is not an NFS datastore. If you convert the
mapping le, a new virtual disk is created and the contents of the mapped LUN are copied to this disk.
For physical compatibility mode RDMs, you can migrate the mapping le only.
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Migration of virtual machines during VMware Tools installation is not supported.
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Because VMFS3 datastores do not support large capacity virtual disks, you cannot move virtual disks
greater than 2 TB from a VMFS5 datastore to a VMFS3 datastore.
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The host on which the virtual machine is running must have a license that includes Storage vMotion.
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ESXi 5.0 and later hosts do not require vMotion conguration in order to perform migration with
Storage vMotion.
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The host on which the virtual machine is running must have access to both the source and target
datastores.
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For limits on the number of simultaneous migrations with vMotion and Storage vMotion, see “Limits
on Simultaneous Migrations,” on page 144.
Chapter 13 Migrating Virtual Machines
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