Migration options for a VM are greyed out

Every year, before Christmas, the update window is coming up for some of my customers. One of these customers was due for minor VMware vSphere updates today. Actually not a big deal even if the customer has not activated vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) on his cluster due to missing licenses. As in previous years, the task was to manually evacuate the individual ESXi hosts one by one and then standardize them via the vSphere Update Manager (VUM). At the beginning everything was running without any issues until I wanted to evacuate the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) as the last VM of the host. For whatever reason, the migrate function was grayed out in the context menu of the VM.

Migration options for a VM are greyed out though vMotion is licensed

So far, vMotion has actually never caused any problems in this cluster. So it was once again time for a little round of troubleshooting.

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How to migrate running VMs to different datastores without Storage vMotion

Today I learned something very useful that I want to share with you. We have some smaller customers from the SMB segment. Here we often find small vSphere clusters with two or three ESXi hosts. These are usually licensed with vSphere Essentials Plus to use the benefits of vSphere High Availability (vSphere HA). The functions contained in this bundle are quite sufficient for regular operation. One function that is missing in vSphere Essentials Plus is the ability to move running VMs from one Datastore to another using Storage vMotion. In this post I want to share with you a way on how you can still move your running VMs between datastores.

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