Jeremiah's Blog

Another note from Jeremy - his first Storage Vmotion with ESX 3.5

Jeremiah

From: Jeremy Waldrop
Sent: Wednesday, December 19, 2007 11:31 AM
To: Jeremiah Cook; Dan Weiss - Varrow Charlotte
Subject: Storage Vmotion

I performed my first storage vmotion today. I moved a running Windows 2003 VM that has a 10 GB C drive from one data store to another and then back again to the original data store.

To perform svmotions you must first download the Remote CLI virtual appliance from here. http://www.vmware.com/download/vi/drivers_tools.html

You also have to download the OVF tool so that you can convert the OVF in the downloaded appliance to a VMX.

I don’t know why VMware couldn’t put this in the GUI or at lease on the host.

For the OVF tool to run you must run it from a machine that has JAVA version 5 or better and you must set the JAVA_HOME environment variable that points to the install path of JAVA.

To run the OVF go out to a CMD prompt and go to the path where the OVF tool was extracted. Run this command to covert the OVF to an ESX ready VM.

ovftool.bat -f path to extracted remote cli ovf file path to destination folder

Once that finishes you can copy the vmx and the vmdks to your data store and then from VC add it to inventory.

I had to edit the new REMOTECLI VM and remove and add the network adapter because I got an error about it be and invalid network configuration.

I powered on the REMOTECLI VM and it prompted me to set a new root password. I was then able to run all the esxcfg- commands and svmotion. I ran svmotion in interactive mode so that it would prompt me for all the required parameters.

svmotion --interactive

It took about 8 minutes to move a 10 GB VM from an FC LUN to a SATA LUN and about 6 minutes to move it back.

Jeremy Waldrop
Varrow

Leading You To IT Value - Specialists in Virtualization, Storage and Disaster Recovery
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