I don't know if I'm asking this question correctly, so please bear with me. I don't see a best practice from VMWare online.

From searching online, I see that Windows Admins are able to move Virtual Disks from one VM to another and I was wondering if there were any recommendations/best practices when it came to moving hard disks from one RHEL VM to another RHEL VM.

https://communities.vmware.com/threa...art=0&tstart=0


I'm thinking it won't be as straight forward with RHEL VMs. I was thinking of some of the variables when moving from one RHEL VM to another RHEL VM, such as:

Underlying storage of SAN (format of LUNs)
Different versions of RHEL (5, 6 and 7)
Different file system types (say moving an EXT3 hard disk to an OS that only has EXT4, and taking into account xfs)
Different hardware architecture (such as x32 and x86_64)
What the purpose of that hard disk or what was stored on it (say hard disks that were dedicated to Oracle and then moved to another RHEL VM that has Oracle running on it, say as a host backup, possibly)

Maybe I'm overthinking this, however I don't think it will be to easy to just power off the RHEL VM and then move it to another RHEL VM.

I'm just wondering what others have done or if there is a good way to do this going from one RHEL VM to another RHEL VM.

thanks

1 Shouldn't make any difference, it'll be seen as a local disk
2 Also shouldn't make any difference if this is a data drive and you're not going to attempt to run any executable from it.
3 Unlikely to be an issue, OS's will generally support "back" a few generations. Also shouldn't be a problem to add support for a particular fs if it IS an issue
4 Assuming the same OS it won't make a difference if it's just data that's being stored.
5 Would depend on the application, and again whether or not you are going to try and run executables off it.

Why not make copies of the disk and a clone of the "target" system and test it to see what happens? We do that all the time here with XenServer as it's as easy as running up a snapshot instance and leaving the networking off.

Some products let you move a vm live.

If you power off a VM client and the drive is not a snapshot type you have in a real sense a powered down system. When you move the client image or physical drive the only difference now will be location. If you move between hardware there could be some issues.

I think you might be referring to vMotion. I am familiar with that and we use that to move VM between different vCenters, say production and dev environment.

Right now I was wanting to move a VM hard disk between production and dev, so we could shorten the time it takes to set up a test system, and have a slice of production data, without trying to do some sort of export.

Or, say if a production VM OS went belly up, we could spin up a new VM, transfer the data disk to the new VM and then do forensics on the belly up VM to figure out what went wrong.

Just thought of this, what if one of the hard disk is part of LVM?

Is there a way to handle this?

EDIT:

Found this URL, however it doesn't mention anything about moving a disk from one VM to another. So I'm thinking these might be the steps taken one a a disk has been moved?