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deitch
Asked: 2015-04-22 12:48:33 +0800 CST

Can I exclude volumes from vMotion in ESX?

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When I do vmotion, the VM's vmdk is usually on a shared storage array (unless I use storage, etc., but let's assume this is enterprise with a SAN).

What if I have 2 volumes: one is the VMDK for the VM, the other is a separately mounted volume for prodigious logs. I might use a local disk.

I am far more tolerant of losing logs in the event of a failure than the VM itself, and the logs demand significant write IO; I prefer to keep that local rather than slam the storage array.

Can I do a vmotion move without moving the logfile disk over?

Or will it file because of open file descriptions in memory, etc.?

Yes, I know, logs should be sent to a log collector and not on disk, but that will take some time to set up; splitting my critical volume (VM) from less-critical (logs) can provide an interim solution.

vmware-esxi

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Trying to clarify :

    vMotion : will move your VM to another ESXi server, leaving VM storage on its original Datastore.

    Storage vMotion : will move VM storage to another Datastore, leaving the VM on its original ESXi server.

    Edit :

    Using Storage vMotion advanced settings, you can specify which storage you want to move and where, and also choose to leave some of the storage in its current location :

    enter image description here

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  2. Using Storage vMotion, you can relocate a VM with disk-level granularity. However, moving a VM from one host to another with a dependency on a local VMDK (on one host) won't work.

    enter image description here

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  3. This sound rather like an HA question. In VMware you would have to set up a cluster between two VMs and switch the service with a fail over cluster.

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