Storage VMotion is a nifty feature in VMware ESX 3.5 (it existed earlier but there wasn’t really any way to use it) for migrating a running Virtual Machine’s virtual disks from one SAN datastore to another without shutting the VM down. Previously the VM had to be powered off and then it was migrated from one server to another (or the same server) with the option of relocating one or more of its disks to a new datastore. With the release of the Remote CLI for VMware Infrastructure, there is now the perl script svmotion.pl (among others) to use Storage VMotion. The Remote CLI install & reference guide (PDF) indicates how to install it and get started but has some problems when doing command line arguments with the svmotion.pl script versus just running it in interactive mode where it always prompts you.
This is my first attempt at using the svmotion.pl script using command line arguments. I had a good experiene using the interactive mode with a different VM but I kept running in to problems trying to move a 2nd VM using the command line arguments. This is when using the RCLI installed on my Windows server that hosts VirtualCenter.
I was originally looking at the Datastore with the VM in VC to see where the VM and its VMX was located. I was incorrectly assuming that all the VM’s disks and config file were together on this datastore. I had to Edit Settings on the VM in VC and go to the Options tab to see that the Virtual Machine Configuration File was actually on a different datastore while the Virtual Machine Working Location was on the datastore that I was assuming held everything. Once I provided this correct datastore path to the VM’s VMX file, then it worked.
Also, I found that I had to format the –vm line with double quotes: –vm=”[Servers09] Delta/Delta.vmx:Servers00″ versus the single quotes shown in the PDF. I also had to omit the –password command since I wasn’t going to put my password in the command and wanted to be prompted. Omitting it causes it to prompt you. Including it with no argument makes the script complain about the formatting of the next option (in my case, the datacenter command). Here is my full command line for moving the “Delta” VM with its config file on “Servers09″ and a couple disks on different datastores consolidating everything to the “Servers00″ datastore:
svmotion.pl --url=https://sol/sdk --username=testuser --datacenter=VDC --vm="[Servers09] Delta/Delta.vmx:Servers00"
From there it prompted me for my password and then appeared to hang with no status bar like in interactive mode but checking in VC shows the task running and slowly moving to 100%.
Pretty cool stuff.
