Distribute Volumes over Several Datastores

To ease storage management, you can use the View/Edit Options page to migrate to separate disks all volumes except the active and system volumes.

You can convert individual volumes and corresponding virtual disks and place the individual disks on different datastores. This ability allows you to have more direct control over storage limitations. You can create a separate virtual disk for each volume for all sources, except .ovf source images. Volume-based cloning depends on the operating system of the host machine. It is not supported for Linux hosts. It is also the only possible cloning type for physical machine sources.

Volume-based cloning allows you to choose which volumes to copy to the destination virtual disks, and to store separate source volumes in separate virtual disks. For managed destinations, you can select different datastores for the destination virtual disks.

Prerequisites

To change datastores, the virtual machine destination must have more than one datastore.

Procedure

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

2	From the Data copy type drop-down menu, select Select volumes to copy.

A list of all source volumes appears.

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

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

4	Modify the settings in the source volumes list.

5	(Optional) To save disk space on the destination, select Ignore page file and hibernation file.

This optimization depends on the source operating system. This optimization saves disk space on the destination virtual machine by not copying the page file and hibernation file to it.

6	(Optional) To create new destination virtual disks, move volumes across destination virtual disks, or delete destination disks, click Advanced.

On the Source Layout tab, you can choose which volumes to copy to the destination and choose the target datastores to accommodate them.

On the Target Layout tab, you can configure the destination virtual disks, create disks or remove existing disks, or move source volumes across disks. For detailed instructions, see Move a Source Volume to a Target Virtual Disk and Create or Delete a Target Disk

7	Select another option to set or click Next to view a summary of the conversion task.

The volumes you selected are saved to the relevant destination virtual disks.

Subtopics

Modify the Settings in the Source Volumes List

During volume-based cloning, you can modify the layout of source volumes on the destination datastore. In the source volumes list, you can select which volumes to copy to the destination virtual machine and control their size on the destination datastore.

Create or Delete a Target Disk

Converter Standalone copies all source volumes to one target virtual disk. You can create and delete target disks to rearrange the source volumes.

Move a Source Volume to a Target Virtual Disk

Converter Standalone copies all source volumes to one target virtual disk. You can move source volumes to newly created target disks.