Migrating Virtual Machines Between vCenter Server Systems

You can migrate powered-on and powered-off virtual machines between vCenter Server instances. With Advanced Cross vCenter vMotion, you can also move or clone workloads across vCenter Server systems both between on-premises environments and between cloud and on-premises environments.

Cold and Hot migration of virtual machines across vCenter Server systems is helpful in certain VM provisioning cases.

• Balance workloads across clusters and vCenter Server instances.
• Elastically expand or shrink capacity across resources in different vCenter Server instances in the same site or in another geographical area.
• Move virtual machines between environments that have different purposes, for example, from a development to production.
• Move virtual machines to meet different Service Level Agreements (SLAs) regarding storage space, performance, and so on.

Note: During the migration of a virtual machine to another vCenter Server system, the performance data that has been collected about the virtual machine is lost.