Simple Question - How to move VMs from 1 box to another?

[chimoe125]

Hello,

I'm new to VMware products so please bare my stupidity.

I have 2 servers that I got vSphere on. They both have internal attached storage (No SAN yet ) which means I can't take advantage of vMotion. So this leaves me to figure out how would one move a Virtual Machine from one box to another? I currently have both boxes configured with a vCenter Server under 1 datacenter.

[Troy_Clavell]

I believe you can still do a cold migration, even without vmotion. Simply shutdown the VM and then right click on it and choose migrate. If that doesn't work then your best bet would be to use VMware vCenter Converter

You would also use SCP to do it as well

[AndreTheGiant · Accepted solution]

The simplest solution (having vCenter) is use cold migrate operation.

Andre

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[Troy_Clavell]

yup.... after getting another cup of coffee, my Sunday brain started working correctly and as stated if you have vCenter you can do a cold migration. If not, VMware Converter.

[chimoe125]

Thanks,

How do you do a Cold Migration in vCenter?

[Troy_Clavell]

see my first post.... but, shutdown the VM in question, right click on it and choose migrate.

[chimoe125]

Hello,

THanks, What I did was shutdown VM, than rightclick, choose Migrate and choose "Change Both Host & Datastore". Than selected new server host and datastore and it's now copying data... Hopefully all works well. I'll update once all done. I defenitly need to get a SAN solution figured out soon. Would like to take advantagte of HA and vMotion for better uptime. I'll leave that to another thread.

[Troy_Clavell]

you should have no problems

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