How does storage vmotion work

This allows you to optimize the performance of the VM, as well as increase or decrease the allocation of memory without much manual work. Another feature of this technology is the ability to use it as a tool for tiered data storage. Each storage level can be adjusted as you wish, depending on the value of the data, the required performance, and more. But there are some significant differences:. Share on linkedin.

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Start Trial. The migration benefits and capabilities offered by Storage vMotion allows businesses to have much more flexibility in storage environments as opposed to traditional storage provisioning. Virtual Machine workloads can effectively be moved in a non-disruptive manner between storage environments. With traditional storage environments such as adding new storage disks and arrays, storage reconfiguration and provisioning is very disruptive to the service of production workloads that may be utilizing storage.

Without the ability to effectively migrate your production workloads from one storage subsystem to another, the service interruptions can be significant. Without technologies like Storage vMotion, the disruption even to virtualized workloads can be equally significant.

If a maintenance operation to underlying physical storage is scheduled, you would have to schedule the move of virtual machine evacuation from the underlying storage where maintenance operations will be performed. This would include powering off the virtual machine, moving the virtual storage from storage A to storage B, then powering the VM back on. As you can imagine, if you have tens maybe hundreds of VMs, this process would be very disruptive and time consuming.

Now, think about the same process where you have Storage vMotion at play. With Storage vMotion, the same scheduled storage maintenance can be performed without any downtime to production workloads. With Storage vMotion, the virtual machines can be migrated from storage A to storage B while it is running.

To end users, the applications hosted by the virtual machines continue to operate as expected. This also comes in extremely handy if you bring in new storage or provision a new SAN. The flexibility in mobility this provides to production workloads allows businesses to reevaluate their storage options, even from a fiscal standpoint. With the pain point of migrating workloads from one storage solution to another removed, businesses can now entertain shorter term leases and other options that would not have been feasible with the downtime and service interruptions involved previously.

Another extremely valuable capability afforded by Storage vMotion is the ability to ensure performance to production virtual machines. Storage DRS makes use of datastore clusters. This works much like traditional DRS at the compute level where resources are evaluated. Storage DRS allows you to manage the aggregated resources of a datastore cluster. Storage DRS provides a great way to manage standalone datastores across hosts and clusters as it utilizes the datastore cluster object to aggregate datastores into a single entity and then apply thresholds to those datastores to manage moving virtual machine storage to different datastores based on capacity and load.

It provides the additional benefits of easing the management pain of moving VMs to different datastores during maintenance events. Having this automated solution is only possible with the capabilities provided by Storage vMotion which is the underlying technology at work with the Storage DRS feature.

It highlights the power of the Storage vMotion functionality in providing load balancing for capacity and IO. One of the huge advantages that comes with Storage vMotion is the ability to perform maintenance on underlying storage.

With traditional storage, as mentioned, this is a huge pain point. Performing maintenance on underlying storage infrastructure with virtual environments without Storage vMotion is extremely disruptive. With no way to cleanly evacuate virtual machines from a LUN, it could mean shutting down the VM, copying it to different storage, and then powering it back on.

With Storage vMotion, you can perform the migration to different storage for running VMs without any downtime. This is a huge benefit. Additionally, as mentioned with the Storage DRS solution that makes use of Storage vMotion underneath the covers, the process to evacuate and relocate the virtual machines is automated. With the datastore maintenance mode that is found under the actions for datastores contained in the datastore cluster, you can place the datastore in maintenance mode like you can for a vSphere ESXi host that is placed in maintenance mode.

Workloads are evacuated with Storage vMotion. Making use of placing a datastore in maintenance mode with Storage Clusters powered by Storage vMotion. In addition to allowing storage troubleshooting or reconfiguration, Storage vMotions allows other capabilities for additional storage flexibility. This includes the ability to more easily embrace new types of storage types and flexible leasing models that may have not been feasible otherwise. With Storage vMotion in use, changing or switching out storage more frequently allows these additional opportunities.