With Storage vMotion, you can migrate a virtual machine and its disk files from one datastore to another while the virtual machine is running. With Storage vMotion, you can move virtual machines off of arrays for maintenance or to upgrade. You also have the flexibility to optimize disks for performance, or to transform disk types, which you can use to reclaim space.
You can choose to place the virtual machine and all its disks in a single location, or you can select separate locations for the virtual machine configuration file and each virtual disk. The virtual machine does not change execution host during a migration with Storage vMotion.
During a migration with Storage vMotion, you can change the disk provisioning type.
Migration with Storage vMotion changes virtual machine files on the destination datastore to match the inventory name of the virtual machine. The migration renames all virtual disk, configuration, snapshot, and .nvram files. If the new names exceed the maximum filename length, the migration does not succeed.
Storage vMotion has several uses in administering virtual infrastructure, including the following examples of use.
- Storage maintenance and reconfiguration. You can use Storage vMotion to move virtual machines off a storage device to allow maintenance or reconfiguration of the storage device without virtual machine downtime.
- Redistributing storage load. You can use Storage vMotion to redistribute virtual machines or virtual disks to different storage volumes to balance capacity or improve performance.
