Storage vMotion- Direct between to ESXi Hosts

[JamesRoss]

Hi all,

This is my first time to the boards, hopefully this is the right way to go about this.

I'm having difficulty with Storage vMotion, it's not a set up we would normally use rather just out of necessity with the current scenario.

We have an office that has 2x ESXi 5.1 hosts. They don't have a budget for SAN with HBA setup and this is only a one off requirement. I have to migrate the VMs from one to the other but with no external storage. I'm looking to Storage vMotion direct from one local datastore to the other.

     I've enabled Software iSCSI on both ESXi hosts

     Created a separate vSwitch with a VMkernal on both physical hosts

     Both VMkernals are on a seperate subnet 172.16.1.* and the production vSwitch is 192.168.5.*

     The allocated NIC's for the 172.16.1.* network are both connected to the same physical switch.

     I can ping the VMkernal and vmkping the VMkernal

     Run a scan for new storage and nothing shows up.

I've used software iSCSI before, a long time ago so I'm probably rusty. The dynamic discovery is normally pointed at the SAN to pick up the storage and it just finds the local storage on each host itself.

In this scenario I've pointed ESX1 at the IP of the ESX2 VMkernal on 172.16.1.* as I dont have external storage. I think this is where I'm going wrong but I don't know what else to point it to to retrieve the local datastores.

Any ideas to try would be much appreciated.

Thanks

[Atomliu]

You can just create a new vswitch with one vmkernel on each host.Note : you should check (used for vMotion) when creating vmkernel. Log on your vCenter Server, migrate the VMs you want .

[JamesRoss]

thanks for the reply Atomliu, I've got 2 vswitches,on both hosts one for the VM's and one separated with just a vmkernal and vmotion turned on

[JamesRoss · Accepted solution]

Sorted using 5.1 feature Shared-Nothing vMotion