Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 12.15
Use the Migrate
Virtual Machine
Wizard to change
a VM's virtual disk
format.
9.
When you have i nished making selections on the Storage screen, click Next to continue
with the Migrate Virtual Machine Wizard.
10.
Review the settings for the Storage vMotion to ensure that everything is correct. If you
need to make changes, use the hyperlinks on the left or the Back button.
Once you initiate the Storage vMotion operation, the Web Client will show the progress of
the migration in the Recent Tasks pane, as you've seen for other tasks (such as vMotion).
There's a notable difference in how Storage vMotion works with vSphere 5.5 when renaming
i les. In prior versions of vSphere, the feature was enabled, and then in it was disabled in vSphere
5.1. In vSphere 5.5 the renaming feature is back with extra functionality. We won't go into details
on how it used to work, but in vSphere 5.5 when you perform a storage vMotion, vSphere will
rename the i les that reside on datastores to align to the VM name displayed in the vSphere Web
Client. This occurs only if the VM in question has been renamed from the vSphere Web Client. If
the VM has not been renamed since it was created or from the last Storage vMotion, this process
does not occur. Understand, you don't have the choice to
not
rename the i les. Storage vMotion
renames the underlying i les to adhere to the VM display name and the i le naming convention
that VMware specii es if it needs to.
The following i les are renamed when part of a Storage vMotion occurs to the following stan-
dard <VM name>.<extension>:
◆
.VMX
.VMXF
◆
.NVRAM
◆
.VMDK
◆
◆
.VMSN
A few notes and caveats: If a VM has two virtual disks (VMDKs) and you only Storage vMo-
tion one of these disks, only the disk and its associated i les would potentially be renamed. If
(based on the naming standard) there are two i les that would receive the same i lename, such
as a snapshot disk, a numeric sufi x is added to resolve conl icts.
