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vSphere 5.5 Storage Enhancement Part 6 – Rename Files using SvMotion

This is something which comes up a lot. In the past, many people used a by-product of the Storage vMotion operation to rename all of the files associated with a virtual machine. In this vSphere 5.1U1 post, I mentioned that we brought back this functionality but you had to set an advanced parameter to make it work. Well, in vSphere 5.5, it works without the advanced option. The following blog post shows you this rename of virtual machine files using Storage vMotion in vSphere 5.5 to rename all of the files associated with a virtual machine.

First off, I rename the virtual machine in the vSphere web client. The original name was cor-svmotion-test-vm. The new name is cor-svmotion-new-vm.

However, most of you will be aware that this doesn’t do anything to the underlying file names. The set of files which makes up this virtual machine continue to retain the original name of the virtual machine (test), as we can clearly see from this file view from the DELL Compellent datastore on which this virtual machine resides:

My next step then to rename these files is to Storage vMotion these virtual machines to another datastore. In this example, I am going to migrate the virtual machine to an EMC Isilon NFS datastore. Once the virtual machine has been successfully migrated, a simple check of the file view on that datastore shows that the virtual machines have been seamlessly renamed to reflect the name of the virtual machine:

A very nice feature which I know many of you use regularly to organize your virtual machines.

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