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PatrickWE
Contributor
Contributor

Moving entire vm's to a secondary storage

Hi,

How can one more an entire VM guest from 1 storage to another storage on the same ESX box... I know I can use CP, but wondering if there is something better... ( No Virtual Center in this lab infrastructure )

On an ESX 3.5 machine with several RAID storage, we have several VM's on the wrong storage. They are on our Storage1 witch is for live machines and faster disks, but we want to move them to storage2, that is a bit less quick and it is used for keeping machines when we don't need them everyday anymore...

Was wondering if there is a magic tool that can do this...

Thanks !!!

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Troy_Clavell
Immortal
Immortal

VMware Converter should work

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espi3030
Expert
Expert

You should be able to do a migration to the same host, when prompted to select a datastore click "Move virtual machine configuration files and virtual disks" vs. "Keep virtual machine configuration..." then select the datastore you want to move them to. Not too familiar with ESX 3.0.2 (yet!), but this can be accomplished in ESX 3.5 with VIC 2.5. Hope this helps.

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PatrickWE
Contributor
Contributor

This is exaclty what I'm looking for, but can't find the option in VIC 2.5. The vm's are powered down, but no such option on right click or in settings.

Can you tell me exactly how this is done trough the menu or command line

Thanks !!!

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Troy_Clavell
Immortal
Immortal

doing a cold migration can ONLY be done if you have Virtual Center. If you have VC, power down the VM, right click and choose migrate.

You can always FTP the files from one host to another and then re-inventory.

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espi3030
Expert
Expert

I did not know that a cold migration was only possible if you have a Virtual Center server. Do you have a VCS?

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Troy_Clavell
Immortal
Immortal

in this particular scenario, when he is using the VIC, yes it can only be done in Virtual Center.

I'm sure there are ways to do copy/move via console commands, but I don't know what they would be.

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Chamon
Commander
Commander

To export vm in 2gb chunks. (This is good if you are going to FTP them or want to store them on external media)

vmkfstools -i /vmfs/volumes/VMFSDRIVE/SERVERNAME/SERVERNAME.vmdk -d 2gbsparse /new_location/servername/server.vmdk

and to import them back.

vmkfstools -i /new_location/servername/server.vmdk /vmfs/volumes/VMFSDRIVE/SERVERNAME/SERVERNAME.vmdk

Or to move them to a different LUN

vmkfstools -i /vmfs/volumes/VMFSSourceDRIVE/SERVERNAME/SERVERNAME.vmdk /vmfs/volumes/VMFSDestinationDRIVE

You then have to updat the vmx file toreflect the new location of the vmdk file

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Nicodemus
Contributor
Contributor

For those of us new to this process... how do we "update the vmx file to reflect the new location of the vmdk file ".. ? Please.

TIA, - Nicodemus

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wila
Immortal
Immortal

Hi Patrick,

Try the script I attached here

--

Wil

| Author of Vimalin. The virtual machine Backup app for VMware Fusion, VMware Workstation and Player |
| More info at vimalin.com | Twitter @wilva
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