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fsckit
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Storage vMotion Super Large VM


vSphere Client 5.1 / VMware ESXi 5.0

I have some very large VMs running Linux that I need to vMotion to another datastore cluster. For example, one of these monsters has about 50 virtual disks of varying sizes, totaling close to 6TB. The disks are thin-provisioned, and only about half of that actually is used.  The largest virtual disks are 250GB.

I added 30 new 2TB disks to the cluster, and made a new datastore cluster out of them. My problem is when I try to do the migration:

I highlight a moster VM, chose Migrate, Change datastore

Set the new datastore cluster as the destination, and click Next, then Finish.

"vCenter was unable to find a suitable datastore to place the following virtual machine files for the reasons listed below."

For every disk in the new datastore cluster I get a message that says, "Insufficient disk space on <datastore_name_XXX>".

This is not true. Every one of those disks is empty. Looks like vSphere is trying to put all 6TB of the VM's disks on a single datastore in the new datastore cluster. Why would vSphere do that and how can I tell it to use multiple disks for the destination?  

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a_p_
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Leadership

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fsckit
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Thanks. No help there. I was looking that page earlier today. Looks ike the author is using a more recent Web-based vSphere client and there might be some options that I don't have in Windows vSphere Client 5.1.

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vervoortjurgen
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

if you do the svmotion you can click advanced. there you can target different disks to different datastores.

wouldnt that be a solution? instead of trying to put all on one datastore

dont know if that will work. just curious now too.

kind regards Vervoort Jurgen VCP6-DCV, VCP-cloud http://www.vdssystems.be
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rcporto
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You're getting this problem may because the default virtual machine settings for the Datastore Cluster is "Keep VMDKs Together", this way the vCenter will may look for a datastore with at least 6TB of Free Space... and based in your configuration, the Largest Datastore Free Space is 2TB.

One workaround is use the Advanced option when migrating and select a different Datastore for each VMDK.

---

Richardson Porto
Senior Infrastructure Specialist
LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/richardsonporto
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fsckit
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Thanks. I did look in Virtual Machine Settings for the Datastore Cluster, and the checkbox for "Keep VMDKs together" is not checked for any of the VMs.

You are correct that I could go into advanced settings and specify a separate destination for each of my 50 disks.  I would think that there should be a way to specify the whole datastore cluster though. 

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fsckit
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Thanks, yes I did try this, and it failed and I can't recall why..  I'll have to try it again. It is very tedious though, with so many disks.

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