Use vMotion to migrate both hosts and data centers

When the virtual machine is powered on, vMotion and Storage vMotion cannot be performed simultaneously. Of course, you can choose to perform them in two steps. To migrate the host and data storage at the same time, you must first power off the virtual machine, otherwise the virtual machine cannot be migrated. Migrating a powered off host is called a cold migration. Cold migration provides the option of moving associated disks from one datastore to another or migrating virtual machines from one datacenter to another. Virtual machines do not need to be located on shared memory. vCenter Server throws warnings when migrating virtual machines configured with 64-bit guest operating systems to hosts that do not support 64-bit operating systems. CPU compatibility checks are not applied when cold migrating virtual machines.

The steps to migrate hosts and datastores simultaneously using vMotion are as follows.

Step 1 Before migrating, determine if the virtual machine has been powered off. Right-click the virtual machine to be migrated, and click Migrate in the shortcut menu that pops up, as shown in the figure below:

Step 2 This VM is currently on server 10.128.114.74 and was stored on unshared datastore1. We cold-migrate it to server 10.128.114.76 and migrate the storage to other storage, as shown in the figure:

Step 3 Select "Change host and datastore" in the type of migration, i.e. move the virtual machine to another host and store it to another datastore, as shown in the figure:

Step 4 Select the target server. At this time,"Verification Successful" will be displayed below, as shown in the figure:

Step 5 Select the target data store and confirm compatibility as "Verification Successful." In the Select Virtual Disk Format drop-down menu, select the disk format after migration, as shown in the figure below:

Step 6 Check the current settings. Click the Back button if you need to modify them, otherwise click the Finish button to start the cold migration, as shown in the figure:

Step 7 Check the progress of Storage vMotion migration, which depends on the disk size of the virtual machine, as shown in the figure below:

After successful migration, Windows 7 virtual machine on 10.128.114.76 server, storage migrated to ISCSI2, as shown in the figure, and then turned on the virtual machine power.