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Configure Hosts for vMotion and Migrate Powered-On Virtual Machines

This scenario demonstrates how to configure vCenter Server and ESX/ESXi hosts so that you can migrate powered-on virtual machines without downtime. vMotion is a prerequisite for advanced vSphere features such as vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) and vSphere High Availability (HA).

Prerequisites

■	Verify that you have at least two ESXi hosts that are licensed for vMotion or are in evaluation mode.
■	Verify that you have running instances of vCenter Server and the vSphere Web Client.
■	Verify that hosts have access to shared storage of a supported type, such as Fibre Channel, iSCSI, or NAS.
■	Verify that the source and destination hosts have compatible CPUs.
■	Verify that hosts have access to the same physical networks.
■	Verify that you have at least one active Gigabit Ethernet adapter on each host.
■	Virtual machine files must be on shared storage visible by the hosts.
■	Virtual machines must run a supported operating system.
■	Virtual machines must not have a connection to a virtual media device with a mounted local image.
■	Virtual machines must not have a connection to an internal vSwitch that is not connected to a physical network.
■	Virtual machines must have access to the same subnets.
■	Virtual machines must not have CPU affinity configured.

Procedure

1	Create a Datacenter and a Cluster To begin with the vMotion example scenario, prepare an EVC-enabled virtual environment for the hosts that you are configuring for vMotion.  vSphere environments are typically organized into datacenters and clusters.  Using vSphere EVC clusters reduces the risk of incompatible host CPUs that might prevent vMotion migrations.
2	Add Hosts to the EVC-Enabled Cluster Add the hosts ESXi-A and ESXi-B to your vSphere inventory. Place them in the cluster My EVC Cluster to ensure CPU compatibility between hosts.
3	Configure vMotion Networking on the Source and Destination Hosts vMotion migrations use a dedicated network to transfer the virtual machine state between the source and destination hosts.  You must configure such a network for each host that you will use for vMotion migrations.
4	Install VMware Tools After you have set up an environment with two hosts and configured vMotion networking,  ensure that the virtual machines meet the requirements for vMotion.  Install VMware Tools to ensure better virtual machine performance.
5	Migrate Powered-On Virtual Machines by Using vMotion After you configure your vSphere environment for vMotion, you can use the vSphere Web Client to migrate powered-on virtual machines between the hosts ESXi-A and ESXi-B.  In a production environment, vMotion guarantees minimal downtime of critical tasks that run in virtual machines.