Moving Lab Manager Datastores
Published on 4 Feb 2010 · Filed in Information · 263 words (estimated 2 minutes to read)You might have noted a slight incompatibility between VMware vCenter Lab Manager and one of VMware vSphere’s core features, Storage VMotion, in this earlier post on VMware Lab Manager design considerations by former co-worker Aaron Delp:
Storage VMotion and VMware VCB are not supported with Lab Manager.
Obviously, this could present a problem for users who might need to migrate Lab Manager datastores from one LUN or array to another LUN or array. So what’s a user to do?
Fortunately, an internal discussion on this earlier today turned up some great information on a utility called SSMove. What is SSMove?
SSMove is a utility installed on the Lab Manager server that allows you to move data from one datastore to another. You can move a specific tree of related virtual machines. See “Viewing Virtual Machine Datastore Directories” in the Lab Manager User’s Guide for more information on trees. To move an entire datastore, you must move all its trees individually.
Credit goes to rockstar team member Denis Guyadeen for pointing out this utility. More information is available at this links:
VMware KB: Moving a datastore using SSMove
VMware KB: SSMove does not work if a datastore is disabled (3.0.2 only)
VMware Lab Manager 3 Online Library - Managing Datastores
So, if you are needing to migrate data in Lab Manager from one datastore to another, this is your tool.
I haven’t yet found any information on whether SSMove is also included in Lab Manager 4. (To be fair, I haven’t really searched too hard.) If anyone knows, please speak up in the comments.