Newb With Low Budget Environment Has A Question About vMotion

[MerlinTVD]

Be gentle

I have purchased a pair of Lenovo x3650 M5 servers that each have 2.8TB of SSD storage that is directly attached via the onboard M5200 controllers.  I have also purchased the vSphere 6.5 Essentials Plus Kit that licenses me for 3 hosts and includes vMotion and the vCenter appliance.  Last year I completed the ICM class and I have enough knowledge from that class to run a new VMware environment with about 10 guest VM's.

My question is: am I going to be able to vMotion a guest VM from 1 host to the other if both hosts have enough storage space to fit all the VM's?  Is shared storage a hard requirement for vMotion of a live running guest VM from 1 host to another?  I am seeing conflicting information on this and while the ICM class instructor stated that shared storage is a requirement, I have spoken to a bunch of VAR's who say that we only need enough disk space and network bandwidth on each host.  Who's correct?  I have tried to look up this topic in the VMware documentation but there isn't anything that I have found that explicitly states that DASD prevent a vMotion from working.

[daphnissov]

My question is: am I going to be able to vMotion a guest VM from 1 host to the other if both hosts have enough storage space to fit all the VM's?  Is shared storage a hard requirement for vMotion of a live running guest VM from 1 host to another?

Yes, you can vMotion without shared storage provided you have a vMotion network configured and the VM to be migrated is eligible for vMotion to occur. Shared-nothing vMotion was introduced in vSphere 5.1 in the web client only. As you're using vSphere 6.5, you should be using the web client anyhow, so that shouldn't be an issue.

[TheBobkin]

Hello MerlinTVD​

This is unfortunately still a common misconception for some people - XSvMotion (Compute+Storage vMotion between resources without shared storage) is possible:

"vMotion does not require environments with shared storage."

As daphnissov said, this has been around since 5.1:

https://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-51/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.vmware.vsphere.vcenterhost.doc%2FGUID-5616...

and remains the same:

https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/6.0/com.vmware.vsphere.vcenterhost.doc/GUID-561681D9-6511-...

While live vMotion of VMs off one host onto another is great from a maintenance perspective, your current set-up would leave any VMs residing on local-storage of a host inaccessible in the even tof a host failure (e.g. hardware issue/PSOD) so do consider some form of back-up/restore solution to restore production in this event.

Bob

[MerlinTVD]

Yes, I am well aware that there is a giant gaping hole in our setup but I was not permitted to purchase shared storage. Thanks for the links to the relevant documentation.