VMware vSphere SDKs and Tools 6.7

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Storage vMotion Requirements and Limitations

You can migrate virtual machine disks with Storage vMotion if the virtual machine and its host meet specific resource and configuration requirements.
To migrate virtual machine disks with Storage vMotion, the virtual machine and its host must meet the following requirements.
  • For
    5.0 and later hosts, you can migrate virtual machines that have snapshots. For earlier versions of
    , you cannot migrate virtual machines that have snapshots.
  • Virtual machine disks must be in persistent mode or be raw device mappings (RDMs). For physical and virtual compatibility mode RDMs, you can migrate the mapping file only. For virtual compatibility mode RDMs, you can use the
    to convert to thick-provisioned or thin-provisioned disks during migration as long as the destination is not an NFS datastore. You cannot use the
    svmotion
     command to perform this conversion.
  • The host on which the virtual machine is running must have a license that includes Storage vMotion.
  • The host on which the virtual machine is running must have access to both the source and target datastores.
  • A particular host can be involved in up to four migrations with vMotion or Storage vMotion at one time. See
    Limits on Simultaneous Migrations
     in the
    vCenter Server and Host Management
     documentation for details.
If you use the
for migration with
svmotion
, the system performs several compatibility checks. These checks are not supported by the
svmotion
 vCLI command.

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