Migrating traditional virtual machines to vVols datastores

You can migrate virtual machines from traditional datastores to Virtual Volumes (vVols) datastores to take advantage of policy-based VM management and other vVols capabilities. vVols datastores enable you to meet increased workload requirements.

Before you begin

You must have ensured that VASA Provider is not running on any of the virtual machines that you plan to migrate.If you migrate a virtual machine that is running VASA Provider to a vVols datastore, you cannot perform any management operations, including powering on the virtual machines that are on vVols datastores.

About this task

When you migrate from a traditional datastore to a VVol datastore, the vCenter Server uses vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) offloads when moving data from VMFS datastores, but not from an NFS VMDK file. VAAI offloads normally reduce the load on the host.

Procedure

Right-click the virtual machine that you want to migrate, and then click Migrate.
Select Change storage only, and then click Next.
Select a virtual disk format, a VM Storage Policy, and a VVol datastore that matches the features of the datastore that you are migrating, and then click Next.
Review the settings, and then click Finish.