Administration Guide › Managing Virtual Environments › VMware vSphere and vCenter Server › VMware vCenter Provisioning and Common Use Cases › Migrate a Virtual Machine

Migrate a Virtual Machine

You can migrate a virtual machine to move it to another ESX host. You can migrate a powered off machine or migrate a powered on machine with VMotion. You cannot migrate a virtual machine that is suspended.

To migrate a virtual machine

1. Open the Explore pane.

   Available groups, services, and systems appear.

2. Find and right-click the virtual machine to migrate on the Explore pane and select Management, Migration.

   The Migration pane appears.

3. Enter the destination ESX server and resource pool for the virtual machine, and click Migrate.

   Note: VM migration between ESX hosts is only supported when the VMs datastore/disk is shared between the two ESX hosts.

   A confirmation message appears.

4. Click the Summary tab for the virtual machine.

   Verify that an event appears to confirm the operation. The virtual machine appears in its migrated location in the Explore pane after the operation completes.