VMware 4.1 - Is it possible to do automatic migration of VM's across hosts when LUN is near full capacity

[sagarwal1981]

Hi All,

We have VMware 4.1 - Is it possible to  do automatic migration of VM's across hosts when LUN is near full capacity.

Suppose I configure that if a LUN is near 85% of capacity , can i do a configuration that VM will be moved to another host without any manual intervention.

Thanks

Saurabh    

[weinstein5 · Accepted solution]

Welcome to thr Community - First question I have is how are you configuring your virtual disks -are you doing Thin or Thick provisioning - if you are using Thick Provisioning the virtual disk size will not grow - if you are using Thin Provisioning the disks will grow as spaced is used so you can run into situation where you will run the risk of filling up the VMFS datastore - this risk is the reason why best pratice is not use Thin Provisioning for production machines

Now to answer your question - first to thing keep in mind vmotion does not move where the VM is stored it just moves the running instance of the VM from one ESXi host to anotherESXi host. YOu would have to take advantage of Storage vMotion - but in vSphere 4 storage vMotion is not automatic.

With vSphere 5 you would be able to use Stirage DRS and that will automatically move the VM as the disk fills.

[sagarwal1981]

Thanks a lot for the nice and descriptive answer.

Appreciate the same.

Thanks

Saurabh