Host Migration (vMotion) through vCenter Server (Change Host and Datastore) !!!

In the last post, I covered only the concept of svMotion through which we can migrate the storage of our VMs among different datastores.

In this post we are going through the host migration alone and migration of both the host and datastore...

Current scenario of the two ESXi hosts,

192.168.56.134 (Host1) with Windows_VM on its storage1 and 
192.168.56.135 (Host2) with Windows_VM2 on its storage2

 

Right click on Windows VM to see the options and click on Migrate....

Select the Migration Type...

Select the destination host, browse through DataCenter and Clusters....

By default vMotion properties take Default priority, if not we will be asked to choose from below

Let's Continue with our migration process.... Verify the details and "click Finish"

Check the status of Registering VM at bottom...

We can see the current VMs in ESXi host1, and can check the logs related to unregistering VM  at the bottom....

Below is the vSphere client screen for the ESXi host2 with the third VM which we migrated from ESXi host1. Below we can see the log related to Registering VM...

Similarly we can migrate Windows_VM2 VM from ESXi host2 to ESXi host1.
Right Click on VM, choose Migrate and select the ESXi host1....

Check the log at the bottom..... Relocate Virtual Machine.... Completed.

vSphere Client Screen of ESXi host1 (192.168.56.134)...

vSphere Client Screen of ESXi host2 (192.168.56.135)...

At the end, after performing Host migration of VMs on both the hosts....
192.168.56.134 (Host1) with Windows_VM2 and 192.168.56.135 (Host2) with Windows_VM 

 

So far we covered the vMigration concept which is Host migration, now let us see how we can migrate both the Host and Datastore at a time.

Current Status of Windows_VM.... It is in host2 and on storage1...

Choose the VM and then right click...

Select migration type as "Change host and datastore"...

Next choose destination host, I chose 192.168.56.134 (Host1)....

Time to select storage, Since it is already in storage1 so lets select Storage2...

Verify the details selected before,

This relocation of VM takes few minutes as it need to copy the storage too...

Due to some issues, I removed Windows_VM2 during relocation in progress... So didn't get confused... Finally our Windows_VM relocation completed successfully....

Check the latest logs at the bottom of both the vSphere client screens....

ESXi Host2

 ESXi Host1

Finally after completion vMotion and svMotion on our Windows_VM, below is the current status of our Virtual Machine....

It is on Host1 (192.168.56.134) and Storage2....

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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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Storage Management using OpenFiler !!!

In the last post, we have seen OpenFiler installation, now let us go through with storage management using OpenFiler. Let us start by adding volumes from our SAN volume group...

As of now we don't have any LUNS assigned to any of our ESXi hosts. We can check current storage status of our hosts from vCenter Server.

Login to Web GUI of OpenFiler, Click on volumes ...

and then click add volumes,

Create a volume with desired size from available space and select FS type as block (since this is iSCSI storage).

I am using remaining space to create one more LUN with name SAN2.

As of now, we created two volumes from our volume group SAN...

Done with Volume creation, now we need to add a iSCSI target. iSCSI target can be a physical resource and sometimes it can be software based.

Software based iSCSI is a protocol used to link data storage devices over an IP network infrastructure.

Now we have a iSCSI target, so we are good to map these luns... Click on Lun Mapping...

Click on "map" to map both the LUNs....

So both are mapped...

Start the iSCSI target service...

Click on System tab, to configure network access....

Enter the Name and Network, click on "Update"

Configure the Network which can access the iSCSI storage...

Click on Network ACL (Access Control Lists) to provide the access to our storage....

Select "Allow" from the drop down..

Select the configuration tab and then click on the Storage Adapters.... 

Then click on the properties of iSCSI software adapter...

Dynamic discovery if we give IP of our storage server, it will dynamically take the iSCSI target. Where as in Static we need to enter the name of our iSCSI target along with its IP.

Select the Dynamic discovery and then click on Add..

Enter the IP and click OK...

It will rescan the HBA (Host Bus Adapter) to refresh the targets...

Finally it is time to add our LUN to storage of our ESXi host... Click on "Add Storage"

Choose Storage Type...

 Select Disk/LUN...

Select the FileSystem version...

Give a name for our datastore...

Click on Finish to complete adding the storage step...

Now our new datastore Storage1 is reflected on storage of our ESXi host1.

We can try adding the other volume to our storage of ESXi host2...

Select the second LUN....

Finally we added one LUN for each of the ESXi hosts...

By this we added two datastores from LUNS which we created on our OpenFiler SAN.

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