Live migration of a VM with Workstation 6

[NeilBradley]

I'm running VMware Workstation 6, and I have a 465 gigabyte VM on one of my drive arrays. I'd like to move it over to another drive array in the same system. I know how to do the "take the VM down/copy all the files" approach, but I'm wondering if there is a way to move a VM from one place to another on the same host while it's live? The VM serves the world and I'd like to keep it active during the process if at all possible.

I hunted around for things like Converter and other tools, and searched the forum archives for something like this, but I haven't found anything yet.

Thanks!

[jjkrueger · Accepted solution]

No dice. Workstation doesn't provide a mechanism for any type of live VM migrations. Until the latest release, VMware flagship hypervisor didn't even support disk migrations while live.

If you want to shell out the cash for it, PlateSpin's PowerConvert may have some functionality that will minimize your downtime, but I'm unaware of any product that will completely remove downtime from the equation.

-jk

[NeilBradley]

Rats.... well, thanks for the reply. It at least tells me what I need to know. Merry Christmas!