vMotion requirements

Before performing a vSphere vMotion migration, ensure that the following conditions are met:

VM requirements

• the VM must not have a connection to an internal standard switch.
• the VM must not be connected to any device physically available to only one ESXi host, such as disk storage, CD/DVD drives, floppy drives, and serial ports.
• the VM must not have a CPU affinity configured.
• the VM must have all disk, configuration, log, and NVRAM files stored on a datastore accessible from both ESXi hosts.
• if the VM uses RDM, the destination ESXi host must be able to access it.

Host requirements

• shared storage is required. VM files on a VMFS or NFS datastore need to be accessible by both the source and destination ESXi host.
• at least a Gigabit Ethernet network interface card with a VMkernel port enabled for vMotion on each ESXi host is required.
• identically named virtual machine port groups connected to the same network. All port groups to which the VM is attached must exist on both ESXi hosts. Note that the port group naming is case sensitive.
• CPUs in both ESXi hosts must be compatible. CPUs need to be from the same vendor (AMD or Intel, for example), CPU family, and must support the same features. Note that some features CPU features can be hidden by using compatibility masks.