Migrate a Virtual Machine to New Storage

Use migration with Storage vMotion to relocate the configuration file of a virtual machine and virtual disks while the virtual machine is powered on.

You can change the virtual machine host during a migration with Storage vMotion.

Prerequisites

• Verify that your system satisfies the requirements for Storage vMotion. See Storage vMotion Requirements and Limitations.

• Required privilege: Resource.Migrate powered on virtual machine

Procedure

1. Right-click the virtual machine and select Migrate.
   1. To locate a virtual machine, select a data center, folder, cluster, resource pool, host, or vApp.
   2. Click the Virtual Machines tab.
2. Click Change storage only and click Next.
3. Select the format for the virtual machine's disks.

   Option	Action
   Same format as source	Use the same format as the source virtual machine.
   Thick Provision Lazy Zeroed	Create a virtual disk in a default thick format. Space required for the virtual disk is allocated during creation. Any data remaining on the physical device is not erased during creation. Instead, it is zeroed out on demand on first write from the virtual machine.
   Thick Provision Eager Zeroed	Create a thick disk that supports clustering features such as Fault Tolerance. Space required for the virtual disk is allocated at creation time. In contrast to the thick provision lazy zeroed format, the data remaining on the physical device is zeroed out during creation. It might take longer to create disks in this format than to create other types of disks.
   Thin Provision	Use the thin provisioned format. At first, a thin provisioned disk uses only as much datastore space as the disk initially needs. If the thin disk needs more space later, it can expand to the maximum capacity allocated to it.

4. Select a virtual machine storage policy from the VM Storage Policy drop-down menu.
   Storage policies specify storage requirements for applications that run on the virtual machine. You can also select the default policy for vSAN or Virtual Volumes datastores.
5. Select the datastore location where you want to store the virtual machine files.

   Option	Action
   Store all virtual machine files in the same location on a datastore.	Select a datastore and click Next.
   Store all virtual machine files in the same Storage DRS cluster.	Select a Storage DRS cluster. (Optional) To disable Storage DRS with this virtual machine, select Disable Storage DRS for this virtual machine and select a datastore within the Storage DRS cluster. Click Next.
   Store virtual machine configuration files and disks in separate locations.	Click Advanced. For the virtual machine configuration file and for each virtual disk, select Browse, and select a datastore or Storage DRS cluster. (Optional) If you selected a Storage DRS cluster and do not want to use Storage DRS with this virtual machine, select Disable Storage DRS for this virtual machine and select a datastore within the Storage DRS cluster. Click Next.

6. Review the information on the Review Selections page and click Finish.

Results

vCenter Server moves the virtual machine to the new storage location. Names of migrated virtual machine files on the destination datastore match the inventory name of the virtual machine.

Event messages appear in the Events tab. The data displayed on the Summary tab shows the status and state throughout the migration. If errors occur during migration, the virtual machines revert to their original states and locations.