Using Storage vMotion
vMotion and Storage vMotion are like two sides of the same coin. Traditional vMotion migrates a running VM from one host to another, moving the CPU and memory resource usage between hosts—but leaving the storage of the VM unchanged. vMotion enables you to manually balance the CPU and memory resource by shifting VMs from host to host. Storage vMotion, however, migrates the virtual disks of a powered on VM from one datastore to another, all while the VM continues to execute—and therefore using CPU and memory resources—on the same host. This feature allows you to manually balance the utilization of a datastore by shifting VM storage from datastore to datastore. Like vMotion, Storage vMotion is a live migration; the VM does not incur any downtime when migrating virtual disks from one datastore to another.
The process for Storage vMotion is relatively straightforward:
- vSphere copies over the nonvolatile files that constitute the VM: the configuration...
