Today the question was asked if VMware supports migrating a virtual machine with Storage vMotion between NFS and VMFS datastores.
Needing to convince someone that live storage vMotion between SAN->NAS is supported. Can only find marketing piece, anyone have a tech doc?
— Matt Vogt (@mattvogt) February 6, 2013
It appears no documentation is explicitly stating whether or not it is supported.
The official answer is Yes, VMware supports Storage vMotion between NFS and VMFS datastores. Please note that VAAI hardware offload is not leveraged as the data is moved between Filesystem and block based storage.
We just moved 3000 vms from block to NFS using storage VMotion
Just went in the other direction because of those? issues
http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2016122
NetApp freezes for minutes even when SIOC turned on
Indeed, I moved well over 1000 VM’s last year using storage vMotion…I thought one of the biggest points of it was to migrate storage
Frank I have a question that I can’t get a straight answer on regarding Storage vMotion from an NFS datastore to a VMFS datastore maybe you can shed some light on.
If I have a thin provisioned 1TB disk with 10GB of data it and I Storage vMotion it from an NFS datastore to a VMFS datastore (connected either with iSCSI or SAS) it will take ALL the whitespace in the disk with it and it takes forever to move.
Take that same disk and move it from VMFS back to NFS and it takes just a few minutes since it’s only copying the data and not the whitespace.
Depending on who I’ve talked to at VMWare and NetApp you’ll get two different answers 1) this is completely normal since VMWare can’t see the data inside the NFS file or 2) this is not right and there is a problem.
What are your thoughts on this? Thanks.
We cannot combine NFS and VMFS data-store in datastore cluter
Abdul,
Nobody is talking about datastore clusters. Just a normal storage vmotion process between datastores.