looking for an HowTo to confugure Storage VMotion

[AWahlert]

Hi there,

we are using VI3 with 4 ESX Servers and two EMC SAN's. Now i want to configure for testing purposes Storage VMotion, but i can't find any docus on how doing this.

Can me please someone point to the HowTo's??

friendly Regards from vienna

Andreas

[wgardiner · Accepted solution]

Download and install the 3rd Party VMotion Plugin from here: http://code.lostcreations.com/wiki/vmware/viplugins/svmotion?id=code/wiki/vmware/viplugins/svmotion

That makes Storage Vmotion easy as pie. Or if you don't want to install a 3rd party plugin then you'll need to grab the toolkit from VMware.

More info about the plugin in this thread:

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/126141?tstart=0&start=0

[VBarak]

svmotion is only availabe through command line interface

you can download the RCLI from vmware site and work with that, but its really complicated, alot of parameters and you dont want to lose your vmdk files in you datastroes.

the third party metioned above is great, i personally worked with it, but it is not supported by VMware, so keep that in mind if you are going to use that in production environments...

good luck!

[AWahlert]

Ahh,

ok.

I guess, i will use the cli. Is the svmotion command also available in the serviceconsole on one of the ESX Servers or can it be only used through RCLI?

regards

Andreas

[airswimmmer]

hi , I don't think the command works in ESX console, you need to run in in command prompt in an windows machine with RCLI installed.

I have actually SVMed about 60 servers between two different SANs in our production environment, using the CLI was quite simple, once you figure out an template, all you do is to replace the vmx path for different VMs. that worked out very well. The third party GUI tool can generate the commands for you, but I don't think it's necessary go through the trouble cos sometime the GUI doesn't work, just use windows command prompt. the only problem I had was SVM causes high CPU and/or mem problem for guest OS, it's meant to be totally transparent to guest OS, but that indeed was the problem I had for almost every single of the 60 moves. maybe because SVM is till in trial.

here is an simple example:

svmotion.pl --server=<ip of virtual center> --username=< admin username> --password=<password> --datacenter="<name of datacenter>" --vm="[<source LUN name>] <server name>/<server name>.vmx:<dest LUN name>"