esx 3.5 storage vmotion question

[whuber97]

Hello everyone,

1st post here... I have a quick question about the new stoage vmotion available in esx3.5

Is it possible to vmotion a VM located on the local storage of 1 ESX host to a different ESX host's local storage? In other words, does storage vmotion give you the capability to vmotion across ESX hosts without shared storage?

This would be huge for some of my smaller clients who don't have the budgets to break into the shared storage arena, but who could really get some value out of the benefits that server virtualization gives them.

Thanks in advance!

[Dave_Mishchenko]

Your post has been moved to the VI3 v3.5 New Features forum

Dave Mishchenko

VMware Communities User Moderator

[Troy_Clavell]

I do not believe this is possible. You still have to have shared storage for sVMotion to work... I could be wrong though.

However, you should be able to accomplish this using VMware Converter.

[ctfoster]

Put simply - No.

However the requirements for SvMotion are now only a host that can host an NFS resource - the costs are coming down all the while.

[dconvery]

SvMotion will only work between datastores that are accessible by the hosts that "owns" the VM, so it will not work from local on one to local on another. It will only work on local to local on the same server or local to shared. Troy made the best suggestion for you - use VMware Converter to move the VM.

Dave

[kmeyer9]

We are in the planning stages of doing something similiar to this. What we were thinking of trying is using a host sort of as a proxy server. The host would have 2 hba's with one pointing to one set of luns and the second to the other. Of course then we would have hosts seeing the new storage only. We then would "vmotion" to the proxy host and then "sVMotion" to a host seeing the new storage only. Anyone ever tried this?

[ctfoster]

Never tried it but there is no reason why it wouldn't work. Might be worth reposting this as a new thread just to get some additional input.