Distribute Disks over Several Datastores

For managed destinations, disk-based cloning allows you to copy virtual disks to different datastores within your virtual environment.

Prerequisites

The destination for the virtual machine must have more than one datastore. The target datastores must be online and connected when the target virtual machine starts up.

Disk-based cloning is not supported for physical machine sources.

For Linux hosts, you can perform only disk-based cloning.

Procedure

1	On the View/Edit Options page, click Data to copy in the left pane.

2	From the Data to copy drop-down menu, select Copy all disks and maintain layout.

A list of all virtual disks in the source machine appears.

3	In the Disk column, select a source virtual disk.

4	In the Type column, select the disk type from the drop-down menu.

The options depend on the source machine you select.

Available Disk Type	Description
Flat	Copies the entire source disk size to the destination, regardless of its used and free space.
Thin	Creates a thin provisioned disk. This option is available for managed destinations that support thin provisioning.

5	In the Target Datastore column, use the drop-down menus to select a destination datastore for each disk.

6	(Optional) To change the datastore to accommodate the *.vmx destination configuration file, click Back and select the datastore from the drop-down menu.

This menu appears only for virtual machine destinations in a VMware virtual infrastructure.

7	Click Next to view a summary of the conversion task.

8	Click Finish to add the task to the task list.

The target virtual disks are saved to the datastores you specified in the conversion task.