Manually Cold Migrating Virtual Center VM

[baptista]

Has anyone moved a Virtual Center vm to a different datastore? I may be needing to do this and as far as I can see I would need to down the vm, ssh into an esx host, move the files to the new datastore location, and start it back up. All ESX hosts in the cluster are SAN connected to the source and destination datastores.

Anyone know of anything stored in the virtual center database that would cause problems with this procedure when it comes back up since it would be offline while I moved the files?

Robert

[esiebert7625]

You can manually move it by un-registering the VM in VC, copying the files using SCP, import the disk file using vmkfstools -i and then registering the VM in VC in it's new location. Yes the path to the VMX file is stored in the VPX_VM table in the VC database but un-registering and re-registering the VM will correct that.

You can also use this script to move the VM to a new datastore.

Script for moving a VM to different storage - http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=89885

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Thanks, Eric

Visit my website: http://vmware-land.com

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[baptista]

Can you unregister and register a vm while it is running?

[esiebert7625]

No you cannot, the "Remove from Inventory" option is grayed out while the VM is on. If you suspend the VM or power it off you can remove (un-register) it.

[akmolloy · Accepted solution]

Funny, I just did this today. I wasn't aware that you couldn't migrate a machine to new storage when logged in directly to an ESX server, so I had to figure out an alternate way.

I powered down the VM and just used Converter to create a copy onto the new LUN. This was straightforward and pretty easy to do. Once I'm sure the VM is sound, I'll delete the old VM.

I was going to go the vmkfstools route, but I wasn't sure of all the steps.