On one of my ESX hosts if I right click on a vm and select migrate, it tells me that the machine is required to be shut down for this to continue (this happens on EVERY vm on the ESX host). Why would this be? I am running ESX 4.0 and have licensing for vMotion, DRS, HA, etc...
This is just a warning message, meaning if you want to change both host and datastore at the same time, the guest must be powered down. However, if you simply want to Change Host, proceed. If you simply want to change datastore, proceed. If you want to do both, do one of the other first.
Is the virtual machine located on shared storage? If it is not and it is on local storage then you will need to power off the VM before you can migrate it also the network configuration needs to be the same on the destination host -
This is just a warning message, meaning if you want to change both host and datastore at the same time, the guest must be powered down. However, if you simply want to Change Host, proceed. If you simply want to change datastore, proceed. If you want to do both, do one of the other first.