6.7

The location of the virtual machine swap file affects vMotion compatibility as follows:
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For migrations between hosts running ESXi 6.0 and later, vMotion and migrations of suspended and
powered-off virtual machines are allowed.
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During a migration with vMotion, if the swap file location on the destination host differs from the swap
file location on the source host, the swap file is copied to the new location. This activity can result in
slower migrations with vMotion. If the destination host cannot access the specified swap file location,
it stores the swap file with the virtual machine configuration file.
See the vSphere Resource Management documentation for information about configuring swap file
policies.
Migration with vMotion in Environments Without Shared Storage
You can use vMotion to migrate virtual machines to a different compute resource and storage
simultaneously. Unlike Storage vMotion, which requires a single host to have access to both the source
and destination datastore, you can migrate virtual machines across storage accessibility boundaries.
vMotion does not require environments with shared storage. This is useful for performing cross-cluster
migrations, when the target cluster machines might not have access to the source cluster's storage.
Processes that are working on the virtual machine continue to run during the migration with vMotion.
You can use vMotion to migrate virtual machines across vCenter Server instances.
You can place the virtual machine and all its disks in a single location or select separate locations for the
virtual machine configuration file and each virtual disk. In addition, you can change virtual disks from
thick-provisioned to thin-provisioned or from thin-provisioned to thick-provisioned. For virtual compatibility
mode RDMs, you can migrate the mapping file or convert from RDM to VMDK.
vMotion without shared storage is useful for virtual infrastructure administration tasks similar to vMotion
with shared storage or Storage vMotion tasks.
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Host maintenance. You can move virtual machines off a host to allow maintenance of the host.
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Storage maintenance and reconfiguration. You can move virtual machines off a storage device to
allow maintenance or reconfiguration of the storage device without virtual machine downtime.
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Storage load redistribution. You can manually redistribute virtual machines or virtual disks to different
storage volumes to balance capacity or improve performance.
Requirements and Limitations for vMotion Without Shared Storage
A virtual machine and its host must meet resource and configuration requirements for the virtual machine
files and disks to be migrated with vMotion in the absence of shared storage.
vMotion in an environment without shared storage is subject to the following requirements and limitations:
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The hosts must be licensed for vMotion.
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The hosts must be running ESXi 5.1 or later.
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The hosts must meet the networking requirement for vMotion. See vSphere vMotion Networking
Requirements.
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