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| Prev | How Symantec Storage Foundation and High Availability Solutions work in a VMware environment | Next |
When a virtual machine (VM) is selected for movement of disk files to a new disk storage (DS) using Storage vMotion, the following takes place:
The VM home directory (config, log, swap, snapshots) is copied to the destination DS.
A "shadow" VM is started on the destination DS using the copied files. The "shadow" VM idles waiting for the copying of the VM disk file(s) to complete.
An initial copy of the VMs disk file(s) is made to the target DS. During the copy changes made to the source are tracked (change block tracking).
Storage vMotion iteratively repeats this process of copying the changed blocks from the source DS to the destination DS.
When the amount of outstanding changed blocks is small enough, vMotion invokes a Fast Suspend and Resume (FSR) of the VM (similar to vMotion) to transfer the running VM over to the idling shadow VM. As is the case with regular vMotion, this transfer normally happens so quickly that it will be completely transparent to the VM.
After the FSR completes the old home directory the VM disk files are deleted from the source DS.
Figure: Virtual machine data migration with ESXi tools describes the high level process for VMware.
In VMware, you can add disks to the ESXi server and the virtual machine without rebooting. This functionality makes it possible to offer a better process using Storage Foundation together with raw device mapped storage for online data migration.
Figure: Virtual machine data migration with Storage Foundation describes the high level process for Storage Foundation.
Data migration for Storage Foundation can be executed either locally in the virtual machine with Veritas Volume Manager or in a central location, migrating all storage from an array utilized by Storage Foundation managed hosts. This powerful, centralized data migration functionality is available in Veritas Operations Manager.
See the following Web site for information about Veritas Operations Manager.
