joshua.frederici.net

In a previous post, I described a VMware Storage Migration task I was assigned and a quick run-down of the capability of the Storage VMotion feature.  Now, I’ll go into more detail about an awesome little tool that could make the process much easier.

The tool is called ‘SVMotion‘ and it is a plug-in to the Virtual Infrastructure client that you may already be using to administer your hosts and guest machines.  Once installed, it adds the ‘Migrate Storage’ option to the right-click menu of your VM’s.  When you select it, you will be presented with a window showing a list of datastores and the ones that the VM and its disks are on.

From here, you can drag the VM and its disks from their source datastore to the destination datastore.  Once you click ok, you’ll see a new ‘Relocate Virtual Machine Storage’ task that will show the migrations progress.

There’s a couple things I’ve learned from my use of this plug-in:

     1.  You have the move the actual virtual machine files as part of the migration whether you want to or not.  This is a Storage VMotion requirement.  If you like where the virtual machine files reside, move them with the disk and then move them back after.

     2.  This item appears to be a quirk of the plugin.  Say you have a VM with multiple disks but only want to move the virtual machine files and the first disk.  When you drag the VM to the destination datastore and click ok (having left the remaining disks in their original location), the plug-in attempts to move all VM files to the destination.  If you have the space, it will begin; if you dont, it will immediately return an error.

Overall, this plug-in is very nice and the price is right (free!).  It’s certainly much more convenient to use the GUI to initiate the Storage VMotion whenever you can.