Cross vcenter vm migration with storage vmotion but not all disks

[Sharantyr3]

Hello there,

I am migrating VMs from old vcenter with FC storage (production + low cost storage) to new vcenter with vsan storage (production) and iscsi storage (low cost storage).

iscsi is reachable from old and new ESXis. FC storage is reachable only from old ESXi.

I could successfully do migration to vsan datastore with most VMs, but I have a specific case for big VMs.

I have two different VMs (about 100TB each) that are currently running on old vcenter :

VM 1 : system is on FC, data storage is on iscsi array

VM 2 : system is on FC, data storage is on FC

I would like to know if it would be possible to :

- Move VM1 online but migrate only system disk, as data disk is iscsi and reachable on new ESXis

- Move VM2 online, migrate system disk on vsan and migrate data disks (FC) on new iscsi storage

Do you think it is possible in one shot via powercli or I should migrate both whole VMs to iscsi, then migrate them (without migrating data) to new vcenter, and then migrate system disk to vsan via web interface ?

I hope I make sense as my english is not the best.

Thanks

[daphnissov · Accepted solution]

To my knowledge, this is not possible. Even an intra-vCenter svMotion of individual disks I don't think is possible. Happy to be schooled here, but normally the procedure would be to shutdown the VM and manually move those disks, then reconfigure the VM.

[harry89]

Power of the vms

Migrate all the vmdks to iscsi storage for both the vms

Remove from inventory

Register it on new VC on new host from the iscsi storage .

[Sharantyr3]

Ok, thank you both for your answers.

Too bad it is not possible to do it live

[scott28tt]

It has been a long time since I tried, but I believe this might be possible with a regular Storage vMotion - you can select different destination datastores for the “home” directory and for each virtual disk of the VM.

The easiest way to confirm: build a VM with small disks on each of the source datastores, power it on, and see what options you get when you try and migrate it.

Check other requirements here: VMware Knowledge Base