How to move vmdk between storage devices in 3.0.2?

[renski]

I have a VM which needs to be migrated from esx 2.5 host to a new VC running 2 esx hosts with 3.0.2

I can migrate the VM using VI client, but how can I move one of the storage devices part of the VM to another vmfs storage?

I looked at svmotion but all the utilies seem to require VI 3.5

thanks

[stvkpln]

Yes, storage vmotion (svmotion) does require use of ESX 3.5 / VC 2.5, but you can make use of dMotion if both the 2.5 and 3.0.2 hosts are attached to the same VC server and both the old and new datastores are on shared storage. All you have to do is effectively migrate the VM from the 2.5 host to the 3.0 host and dMotion will automatically move the storage on the backend while the VM remains up. At some point, the VM will need to be shutdown to have it's virtual hardware upgraded and then VMware Tools installed (Tools should be installed after the vhardware update).

[renski]

I have a VM with 2 disks, I need to have 1 of the virtual drives (vmdk) moved to another data store, can I just run cp file.vmdk to /vmfs/devices/volumes/newstorage/ via the service console and then remount it using the VI client?

[Rubeck]

Don't use "cp".... Do it by the book and use vmkfstools when working with .vmdks.

If you're using shared storage the "cp" (and other standard tools) will result in unnessesary SCSI reservations.

/Rubeck

[weinstein5]

Are you looking at upgrading form ESX 2.5? If so there was the precursor to Storage Vmtion as an option to upgrade - using VC 2.0.2 you were able to vmotion a running vm that involved moving the storage form VMFS-2 datastore to a VMFS-3 datastore - check the 2.0 installation and upgrade guide -