Difference between vMotion and Storage vMotion

[NoviceLeo]

Hello All,

Too many "sales" discussions have me confused. I have been trying to get my head around the difference between vMotion and Storage vMotion.

I have inherited a 5.1 Standard running on 2 servers with shared storage.  I am looking at what would be lost if we upgrade to Essentials Plus vs Standard.  As I understand the other differences (hotplug virtual hardware, vSphere fault tolerance), I am not sure what the difference is between vMotion and Storage vMotion.

As I can start listing my guesses, I look to the experts to help educate me.  It may be simple, but the costs are double between and Standard and Essentials Plus.

Thank you all in advance for your support.

[dekoshal · Accepted solution]

With VMotion,  you can move Virtual machine from one ESX Server to another with no downtime for the users. For this datatsore(where virtual machine files are located) should be mounted on both source and destination esxi hosts

Host Configuration for vMotion

VMware vSphere 5.1

Storage VMotion is similar to VMotion it move the virtual machine files from one datastore to another without any downtime for the users. It can be helpful when you are moving vm from local datastore to a shared datastore.

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Best Regards,

Deepak Koshal

CNE|CLA|CWMA|VCP4|VCP5|CCAH

[NoviceLeo]

Hi Deepak,

Just to confirm.  If I have Essentials Plus, if I want to move a VM from one datastore to another, I would have to power off the VM and do an export/import of the VM to the new datastore, correct?

Thank you for your assistance.

[dekoshal]

Yes, with Essentials Plus cold migration can be performed.

With VM powered off you can change datastore - required both source and target datastore to be visible to host, since vm will remain registered with the same host, just files will move

with VM powered off you can change both - VM files and host registration.

If you found this or any other answer helpful, please consider the use of the Correct or Helpful to award points.

Best Regards,

Deepak Koshal

CNE|CLA|CWMA|VCP4|VCP5|CCAH