Storage VMotion

[tohoken]

I am trying to gain an understanding of Storage Vmotion. I know that vmotion requires shared (ie, SAN) storage to work but from my readings, Storage VMotion does not. If I have two ESX servers that both use local storage can I migrate a VM between the two using Storage VMotion or is Storage VMotion only for moving to/from local storage to shared storage? I know using local storage is a bad idea but I am only thinking for a small lab test site.

Thanks,

Ken

[dominic7]

Storage VMotion in it's current incarnation requires you have a server that can see both the source and destination storage. So having 2 systems with independent storage won't work. Currently it's only supported for Fibre Channel migrations ( fibre channel lun to fibre channel lun ), and though I have seen some people on the forums suggest that Storage VMotion was supported with iSCSI a direct question to my TAM yielded a response saying that it was only supported on the fibre channel.

[Gerrit_Lehr]

Dominic is correct. What SVMotion does is putting the vDisks in a snapshotmode so that all write-operations are redirected to a redo-log. Then the vdisk-files are det to read-only and copied to the new location. The ESX Server remains the same, but it needs to the source and destination datastore to copy the vdisk files. After copying the redo-file is commited to the new disk and the VM is linked to the new location of its disk, without interuption.

Kind Regards,

Gerrit Lehr

If you found this or other information useful, please consider awarding points for "Correct" or "Helpful".