Storage Migration (svMotion) through vCenter Server !!!

Ease of Virtual Machine management is the main reason for switching from Physical server to Virtualization environment. In this post we are going to see how flexible the management of VMs.

We can migrate the VMs from one host and another, without system downtime. Different types of migrations are there in  vSphere suite,

1. vMotion (VM can be migrated between hosts).

2. svMotion (Storage of VM can be migrated from local to storage and between one storage to another storage). 

When we work with VM management in vSphere client login of vCenter server, there are 3 different ways of migration.

1) Change Host (Migrating between hosts)

2) Change Datastore (VM's storage migrated to another datastore)

3) Change both (Host and Datastore migration at a time)

Important criteria for vMotion migration is the Processor of source and destination hosts must match and visibility to all storage volumes. Let us see how vsMotion concept works,

Let us enable vMotion properties for the Virtual switch we created...

We can see in the properties, it is disabled.

Click on enable...

Now we are good to go with migration...

Choose type of migration, Change Datastore...

My VM is located on local storage of ESXi host1 (datastore1, remember this is not the datastore which is local to vCenter Server). Now we are migrating it to Storage1 LUN from our OpenFiler Storage....

Verify the details given so far,

Relocation of virtual machine started at the bottom...

So far we have two ESXi hosts,
192.168.56.134 (Host1) with Windows_VM on its local datastore and 
192.168.56.135 (Host2) with Windows_VM2 on its local datastore

 

Similar to VM in ESXi host1, am migrating VM2 in ESXi host2 to Storage2 LUN of OpenFiler.

See the progress of Windows_VM2 at the bottom...

Finally after the svMotion migration, we have the storage details of both the VMs as follows:

 

In this post we covered the storage vMotion, continue to next post for vMotion which is actual Host migration.

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