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Vmware 3.5 has been released with some interesting new features. One of the most “ground breaking” was Storage Vmotion.

Vmotion is the ability to hot migrate a running virtual machine between different ESX hosts. This is typically implemented with DRS (Distributed Resource Sharing) clusters and allows the ESX infrastructure to automatically load balance virtual machines as required.

Storage Vmotion builds on this by allowing live migration of virtual machine disk files across storage arrays ie. it allows relocation between and across the actual shared storage.

Ultimately this allows me to simplify the replacement of arrays and free up storage as I can move the machine files freely around my storage solution.

In it’s initial release using Storage Vmotion was strictly CLI. Luckily it is now a plugin to Vmware Infrastructure and can be managed by the GUI.

As shown below, it can be run both interactively and non-interactively:

Storage Vmotion Interactive
Storage Vmotion Non-interactive
Storage Vmotion VI plugin

Thanks to the Vmware Instructor forum for these flash presentations.