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ditro2001
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Storage vMotion failed. DMotion files removed but how to move vm now

Hello Community,

I've got 4 ESX 3.5 servers with HA and Vmotion.

I've had a problem with storage vmotion with one virtual machine. I did "http://blog.core-it.com.au/?p=441" to remove the DMotion files and everything worked fine. But now I have the problem that the *.vmx and *.nvram and such things are in my new destination and the *.vmdk and *-flat.vmdk are in my old destination.

So what can I do to move everything together? I have to move the harddisks to the new destination. The best thing would be online because it is a sql server which is necessary. But storage vmotion of just hard disk is not possible. Is there any other way to do this online, or do i have to power the virtual machine down and copy the files from console and readd the harddisks in the vmx file?

hope you know what I mean.

regards

Dennis

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ditro2001
Contributor
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Is a storage vmotion of just the vmx file to the old destination possible in order to move in a second svmotion everything (vmx and vmdk files) to the new destination??!??

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GeekBoi
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You can do this two ways. If you power down the guest you can then migrate the guest to a new (same?) host and select the option to "Move virtual manchine configuration files and virtual disks" as well. As the guest is not up and running this will not be a storage Dmotion event and is much less prone to error. In the advanced tab you can even specify where you want the config files and where you want the vmdk files.

When this happens to me I tend to do things the "hard way" on the commandline. I am an Linux admin and a bit of a commandline junkie/gui hater so take that into account. Unregister the guest from the VC with vmware-cmd -s unregister. Then copy the config files (.vmx, .vmxf) to the directory where the vmdk files are located. Using vi I change all config files to point back to the original location of the files (perl one liner works well here as well). Once everything looks correct re-register the guest with vmware-cmd -s register and start it with vmware-cmd <path-to-vmx-file> start.

Charlie

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