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I have two disks physical disks and only one datastore at the moment. I would like to move my datastore from Disk2 to Disk1. I'm sure this is possible but I cannot figure out how to do it from the vSphere client.

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3 Answers 3

up vote 4 down vote accepted

As far as I'm aware, there is no quick way to migrate a datastore between block devices.

  1. Create a new datastore on Disk 2 (e.g. "DS2")
  2. Migrate your virtual machines from "TDS Server" to "DS2", by either:
    • Using Storage vMotion if you have it available within your vSphere licensing to keep the VM available during migration.
    • Shutting down each VM in turn and running an offline migration if you want to keep the disk provisioning type (e.g. Thin Provision) or using the VMware VI Client to copy/paste the files.

You can also migrate the VMs using SSH:

  1. Shut down the VM
  2. Remove it from the vSphere inventory
  3. Log into SSH, and use the mv command to move the VM's directory to the new disk
  4. Re-add the VM to the vSphere inventory by browsing the new datastore
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1  
You don't need to use ssh in the free version. You can do it in the c# client by browsing both datastores and cut and paste between them (it will copy directly) –  JamesRyan 23 hours ago
    
I've had varying results using the VI client - for sheer speed and reliability, moving the files using SSH is enough if you're happy with the CLI. –  Craig Watson 23 hours ago
up vote 4 down vote

You can't move a datastore, you have to move the data in the datastore. If you have the right licence you can just live migrate the VMs from one to the other, anything else in the datastore (ISOs etc) can just moved with the browse-datastore option.

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up vote 0 down vote

Assuming that you can afford some downtime, and if you have nothing stored on the second disk you can shut down all the VMs, unmount the two disks, shut down VMWare, and use a clone tool such as Clonezilla to clone one disk to the other.

For good measure, I would pull the source disk from the system and reboot and remount the copy. It's been a while since I've done this, so I can't remember if you have to remove the VMs and add them back or not. There might be other considerations, so if you are going to take this approach, I encourage you to do some additional research.

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