6.5.1

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Storage maintenance and reconguration. You can move virtual machines o a storage device to allow
maintenance or reconguration 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 dierent
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 conguration requirements for the virtual machine
les 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,” on page 117.
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The virtual machines must be properly congured for vMotion. See “Virtual Machine Conditions and
Limitations for vMotion,” on page 120
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Virtual machine disks must be in persistent mode or be raw device mappings (RDMs). See “Storage
vMotion Requirements and Limitations,” on page 124.
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The destination host must have access to the destination storage.
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When you move a virtual machine with RDMs and do not convert those RDMs to VMDKs, the
destination host must have access to the RDM LUNs.
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Consider the limits for simultaneous migrations when you perform a vMotion migration without
shared storage. This type of vMotion counts against the limits for both vMotion and Storage vMotion,
so it consumes both a network resource and 16 datastore resources. See “Limits on Simultaneous
Migrations,” on page 141.
Migration Between vCenter Server Systems
vSphere 6.0 or later lets you migrate virtual machines between vCenter Server instances.
Migration of virtual machines across vCenter Server systems is helpful in certain VM provisioning cases.
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Balance workloads across clusters and vCenter Server instances.
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Elastically expand or shrink capacity across resources in dierent vCenter Server instances in the same
site or in another geographical area .
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Move virtual machines between environments that have dierent purposes, for example, from a
development to production.
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Move virtual machines to meet dierent Service Level Agreements (SLAs) regarding storage space,
performance, and so on.
N During the migration of a virtual machine to another vCenter Server system, the performance data
that has been collected about the virtual machine is lost.
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Requirements for Migration Between vCenter Server Instances on page 123
You can use migration across vCenter Server instances if your system meets certain requirements.
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Network Compatibility Checks During vMotion Between vCenter Server Instances on page 123
Migration of VMs between vCenter Server instances moves VMs to new networks. The migration
process performs checks to verify that the source and destination networks are similar.
vCenter Server and Host Management
122 VMware, Inc.