6.7

You can use cold or hot migration to move virtual machines to different hosts or datastores.
Cold Migration You can move a powered off or suspended virtual machine to a new host.
Optionally, you can relocate configuration and disk files for powered off or
suspended virtual machines to new storage locations. You can also use
cold migration to move virtual machines from one data center to another. To
perform a cold migration, you can move virtual machines manually or set
up a scheduled task.
Hot Migration You can use vMotion or Storage vMotion to move a powered on virtual
machine to a different host and move its disks or folder to a different
datastore. You can move the virtual machine without any interruption in
availability. You can also move a virtual machine to a different host and to a
different storage location at the same time. vMotion is also called live
migration or hot migration.
Note Copying a virtual machine creates a new virtual machine. It is not a form of migration. Cloning a
virtual machine or copying its disks and configuration file creates a new virtual machine. Cloning is not a
form of migration.
You can perform several types of migration according to the virtual machine resource type.
Change compute
resource only
Moving a virtual machine but not its storage to another compute resource,
such as a host, cluster, resource pool, or vApp. You use vMotion to move a
powered on virtual machine to another compute resource. You can move
the virtual machine to another host by using cold migration or hot migration.
Change storage only Moving a virtual machine and its storage, including virtual disks,
configuration files, or a combination of these, to a new datastore on the
same host. You can change the datastore using cold or hot migration. You
use Storage vMotion to move a powered on virtual machine and its storage
to a new datastore .
Change both compute
resource and storage
Moving a virtual machine to another host and moving its disk or virtual
machine folder to another datastore. You can change the host and
datastore using cold or hot migration. When you move a virtual machine
network between distributed switches, the network configuration and
policies that are associated with the network adapters of the virtual
machine are transferred to the target switch.
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