Showing posts with label how storage vmotion works in background. Show all posts
Showing posts with label how storage vmotion works in background. Show all posts

Saturday 5 March 2016

How Virtual Machine storage vMotion works in VMware?

Or, Explain the background process of Storage vMotion of a Virtual Machine in VMware.

Or, Understanding VMware Virtual Machine’s Storage vMotion.

Storage vMotion is very useful feature of VMware virtualization which gives you option/feasibility to migrate any Drive allocated to Virtual Machine from one to another Datastore in the cluster.

While storage vMotion of a Virtual Machine, we copy/move following files of a Virtual Machine to another Storage/Datastore.

1. VM Home Directory
2. Configurations
3. Logs
4. Swap Files
5. Snapshot and Snapshot Disks
6. Other MISC files associated with the particular VM.

Storage vMotion Process: VMware usage I/O mirroring mechanism for Virtual Machine’s storage vMotion.

I/O Mirroring: While performing storage vMotion, it creates a destination volume with same capacity and architecture similar to source volume. Every I/O occurred in source volume gets mirrored in destination volume. Once all the I/O are mirrored in destination volume, both volumes (Source and Destination) act as same because now both volumes are having same capacity, I/O and architecture.

At any given point of time, we can remove one volume and Virtual Machine will keep running without any interruptions. So, the storage vMotion does the same thing. Once all the I/O are mirrored to destination volume, it deletes the source volume from storage/datastore.

Friends, I have written it based on my best possible understanding of this VM Storage vMotion concept. Please write me about your feedback, suggestion or if you feel anything should be corrected…
Happy Learning. Cheers…