Storage VMotion

Using Storage VMotion to keep critical servers up when shared storage is down

What a great tool Storage VMotion is. I may not use it every day, but when certain situations arise I really appreciate having this feature available.

The other night our storage area network (SAN) admininstrators shut down both of our SANs so they could do a microcode upgrade. Part of this process involved shutting down all of our production virtual machines (VMs) that were on shared storage before the SAN was shut down.

But there are certain servers that you want to have available at all times. In my work this includes at least one DNS and Active Directory server as well as our VPN authentication server. Because these VMs are all on shared storage I decided to use Storage VMotion to move them temporarily to local storage so they would be available while the SAN was down. With Storage VMotion I was able to do this while all the VMs were powered on with no interruption to service.

What Storage VMotion is and how it works

Introduced with VMware ESX 3.5 and vCenter Server 2.5, Storage VMotion allows you to move VMs from one storage data store to another while the VM is running. The difference between VMotion and Storage VMotion is that VMotion simply moves a VM from one ESX host to another but keeps the storage location of the VM the same; Storage VMotion changes the storage location of the virtual machine while it is running and moves it to another data store on the same ESX host. The source and destination data stores can include any storage volume that is configured on an ESX host, which includes local and shared storage. The magic behind Storage VMotion involves several behind-the-scenes steps, which are outlined below: Continued »