SVMotion does not rename files - Duncan Epping

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Category : esx   vmware   howto   svmotion   troubleshooting   vcenter


Duncan Epping posted just a few days ago on his blog - YellowBricks.com of an issue with files not being renamed when you svmotion a VM. This is a royal pain.

Here’s a scenario of why this is aggravating. You have a VM named “TestVM”. When it was created, it created the folder “TestVM” within a datastore with the VM’s folder, the files were labeled “TestVM.vmdk”, “TestVM.vmx”, etc. If this VM was decommissioned, and you wound up reusing it at later time. Some admins would just rename the VM within vcenter and change the hostname of the virtual machine. Unfortunately, in the storage layer, the VM would still be listed as “TestVM”. This can be confusing if you are having to do some cleanup in your datastores. You would come across a folder labeled “TestVM” and not know what VM this belongs to – without going through each VM or running a powershell script to identify it. Like I said, a royal pain.

In the past, you could svmotion the VM to another datastore, and the svmotion process would rename the files. Unfortunately, this got left out of vSphere 5.0. Duncan’s blog gives a fix for this so that you can get back to renaming files with svmotion.

Link: http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2013/01/25/storage-vmotion-does-not-rename-files/


About Sam Aaron
Sam Aaron

Father, Husband, Geek. Workaholic.

Email : mail@micronauts.us

Website : http://micronauts.us

About Sam Aaron

Father. Husband. Geek. Workaholic. US Marine Corps Veteran.

Sam Aaron is a Senior Consultant in the Professional Services Organization for Entelligence, bringing over a decade of expertise in enterprise cloud automation and infrastructure. Sam has spent almost eleven years at VMware leading cloud automation initiatives using VCF Automation (formerly Aria Automation & vRA) and designing scalable, multi-tenant environments with VMware Cloud Director (vCD).

Sam holds multiple certifications including VCF-Architect 2024, VCIX-CMA, and dual VCPs (DCV & CMA), and is a recognized contributor to VMware’s certification exams. As a VMware Hands-On Lab (HOL) Captain and content author from 2015-2025, Sam played a key role in educating and mentoring the global VMware community. He helped to create and develop the automation challenge and troubleshooting labs for VMworld and global virtual forums.

When Sam is not working, he has several hobbies, among these are 3D printing Star Wars robots and turning them into animatronics.

Launched in April 2010, micronauts is Sam's online presence. Here, he has been blogging and sharing knowledge with the virtualization community. This blog acts as a central repository to retain the resolutions and other trivial knowledge that Sam has discovered.

** No information provided here was reviewed or endorsed by VMware by Broadcom, Microsoft, or anyone else for that matter. All information here are opinions based on Sam's personal experience. Use this knowledge at your own risk. **

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