Migrating Virtual Machines with I/O Filters

When you migrate a virtual machine with I/O filters, specific considerations apply.

If you use Storage vMotion to migrate a virtual machine with I/O filters, a destination datastore must be connected to hosts with compatible I/O filters installed.

You might need to migrate a virtual machine with I/O filters across different types of datastores, for example between VMFS and Virtual Volumes. If you do so, make sure that the VM storage policy includes rule sets for every type of datastore you are planning to use. For example, if you migrate your virtual machine between the VMFS and Virtual Volumes datastores, create a mixed VM storage policy that includes the following rules:

• Common Rules for the I/O filters
• Rule Set 1 for the VMFS datastore. Because Storage Policy Based Management does not offer an explicit VMFS policy, the rule set must include tag-based rules for the VMFS datastore.
• Rule Set 2 for the Virtual Volumes datastore

When Storage vMotion migrates the virtual machine, the correct rule set that corresponds to the target datastore is selected. The I/O filter rules remain unchanged.

If you do not specify rules for datastores and define only Common Rules for the I/O filters, the system applies default storage policies for the datastores.