What Is vMotion and How to Migrate VM in vCenter Step by Step?

Virtual machine makes enterprise has a better experience in cloud deployment. VMware is the leading virtualization vendor and many enterprises choose its products like vSphere for their business system.

VMware's products are very mature and that's the important reason why enterprises like them. The predefined templates and user-friendly interface make users get started quickly.

You might have many physical servers and virtual machines in data center. When you are going to maintain or abandon certain server, what should you do to the virtual machines on that server? Is it necessary to shut down the VMs to transfer the data to another ESXi host?

To guarantee the continuity of business, you might need VMware vMotion.

What is VMware vMotion?

vMotion is a kind of virtual machine migration between servers while the virtual machine is running so you don't have to shut down the virtual machine or suspend business system. You can regard it as a live migration which means there is zero downtime or interruption to OS users during workload migration.

The concept is similar to VMware Storage vMotion, but Storage vMotion won't change VM's the host.

What is VMware vMotion used for?

Since you have known the concept of vMotion, when will you need it?

vMotion is very useful. When you find a failure on certain server or it reports an alert, you could use vMotion to migrate the VMs from one server to another without shutting down the VMs.

If the hardware resources on certain host are seriously consumed and there is another host which is relatively empty, vMotion could help you migrate VMs from the busy host to another host without stopping the business system.

Server could continuously work for a long time but hardware still needs maintenance. With vMotion, there won't be downtime and the internet connection won't be lost, too.

The advanced feature DRS (Dynamic Resource Scheduler) could be executed with vMotion to realize automatic load balancing.

If VMware vMotion failed, the virtual machine would just be reverted to the source host.

Note: ordinanry vMotion just doesn't supports migrate VM between vCenters. If you want to migrate VM from one vCenter to another, refer to Cross vCenter vMotion.

Requirements and limitations of utilizing VMware vMotion

vMotion brings much convenience to company but can you use it in your virtual infrastructure? Make sure you get these things prepared first:

1. vMotion feature is licensed.

2. The source and destination management network IP address families must match.

3. Use 10 GbE network adapters for the vMotion network.

4. VM could only be migrate to the host with the compatible CPU performance counters.

There are still other requirements and limitations of utilizing VMware vMotion, you could find more information from VMware. 

You could also try migrating VM without vMotion.

How to use VMware vMotion in vCenter to perform a live migration?

After you know what is VMware vMotion and whether it could be performed in your virtual infrastructure, now you could try to execute it.

Step 1. Open VMware vSphere client > right click the virtual machine you want to migrate > select Change computer resource only

Step 2. You could see all the available servers and their CPU consuming status. Select the server you want to migrate the virtual machine to and click Next

Step 3. Select network if you have created a vSphere distributed switch and port group. If not, just click Next to skip this step

Step 4. Review your migration job and click Finish. Virtual machine would be migrated in a while.

If vMotion failed, you can fix the issue with this guide: Fix Unable to Migrate VM to Another ESXi Host

How to keep your VM data safe and migrate VM via an easier way?

A good resource distribution plan could make your virtual machines and hosts always have excellent performance. In addition, a good disaster recovery plan would make your data and business safe. VMware vMotion is powerful but it works only in the VMware environment. For V2V migration like moving VM from VMware to Hyper-V, you need a more professional solution.

Vinchin Backup & Recovery is an excellent virtual machine backup solution, which is easy to deploy in virtual infrastructure and has outstanding performance for VM backup. It also supports migrate VM across virtual platform.

Agentless Backup: Vinchin Backup & Recovery supports agentless backup on 11 virtual platforms to help you reduce related work and cost, including VMware.

Cross-platform Migration: You could migrate VM not only between hosts running the same virtual platform now, but also migrate it from one virtual platform to another. For example, your VMware backup could be used on Hyper-V to reallocate the workload.

Instant Recovery: To guarantee the continuity of your business, Vinchin Backup & Recovery would recover your failed VM from downtime in 15 seconds, by recovering the VM to the original host or another.

Unified Web Console: A centralized console is enough for you to manage and backup virtual machines on all the platforms.

For instance, if you would like to migrate VM from VMware to Hyper-V:

1. Just select the backup of the target VMware VM

2. Select a Hyper-V host as target host

3. Simply set up restore strategies or directly skip this step

4. Just submit the job and then the VMware VM will be quickly restored on the Hyper-V host

Vinchin Backup & Recovery has been selected by thousands of companies and you can also start a 60-day full-featured free trial here. Also, contact us, leave your requirements, and then you will receive your tailored solution. We have established partnerships with reputable companies all over the world so if you would like to do a local business, you can select a local partner here.

Conclusion

VMware vMotion would help you migrate virtual machine from one host to another while it is running. You could use this feature to perform a live migration to move VM from a busy server to an empty server or execute zero-downtime server maintenance.

VMware vMotion would help you improve the utilization of resource pool and Vinchin Backup & Recovery would keep your VM data safe. To start a new backup experience, just try it now.