Moving a virtual machine from 1 datastore to another

[themelih]

Hi everyone,

I have vsphere 5 essential plus licence and  a server 2008 which is a db server in an AD environment.

The server is in one of the 3 vSphere HA enabled hosts.

The server's db disk is getting low I need to move the server to a new datastore if possible because I really do not have much space on that store and I can't allocate more space to extend it.

I haven't done this before and don't know how where to begin.

This transition shouldn't effect the AD conf and NTFS permissions.

I need you help and advises on this.

Thanks

Melih

[dbalcaraz]

Wow vSphere 5...

Well, is at least vSphere 5.1? Because in this case, you will have Storage vMotion.

You are saying "The server's db disk is getting low", I suppose do you mean the Datastore where this disk resides...

Here is a video from VMware showing how to do it: Virtual Machine Migration (vMotion) of Host and Storage for VMware vSphere (vSOM) - YouTube

The "transition" will not affect any NTFS permissions or AD configuration.

[themelih]

Hi dbalcaraz,

Thank you for your quick answer.

It's actually vSphere 5.5.

For the vMotion thing, when I go to "Migrate" section, it says there is no licence for it so first shutdown the server then do the process.

I am gonna ask if you don't mind. For not to restart the server, do I need to enable vMotion on the networking tab (cause it's not enabled) or just I do not have simple licence for it. Not sure if my licence covers the vMotion or it's bought seperately.

Thanks

Melih

[dbalcaraz · Accepted solution]

Hi, yes...

You must enable vMotion on a portgroup with a dedicated VMkernel.

If you don't have enabled vMotion, well you can use it on your Management network even it's not recommended.

BUT, I checked your version (Essential Plus) and Storage vMotion it's not supported: VMware Knowledge Base

vMotion is supported, but it's only for compute resources (CPU and RAM) and not for storage (your case).

So, the easiest way to do it will be to power-off the server and then move the disk.

There are other ways but it will be more complicated, like for example using Veeam, but you need another license for using certain features.

[cernyj]

Hello, if live migration is mandatory for you, you can try Veeam Quick Migration, which is part of Veeam Free edition:

Moving VMware VM from one host to another without vMotion

Jiri

[dbalcaraz]

Never used that feature for Veeam Free Edition, but sounds good!

[cernyj]

It's quite interesting how Veeam QM uses builtin features of VMware. I made some tests on our environment.

vSphere 6.7 Essentials Plus, Veeam Backup Free (latest)

VM from server A to server B, storage A (SAS) to storage B (NFS), both storage are shared, so both servers can see them - move both compute resources and storage (impossible with vCenter Essentials Plus because licensing)  -> Veeam decided to use vMotion (even if storage vMotion isn't licensed), no snapshots have been made; VM was migrated without downtime (no ping packet loss); after this, you can just standard vMotion back to server A via vCenter

VM on server A, storage A (SAS) to storage B (NFS), same as above, but move storage only -> Veeam decided to use SmartSwitch (snapshots and VM suspend), so some packet loss for few seconds appears (depends on changes made to vdisk since snapshot creation to synchronise source and target); data flow through Veeam service, so even there is additional network communication compared to vMotion => it's de facto Veeam's on the fly VM backup and restore