Implementing storage migration - Windows Server Tutorial

- [Instructor] Using storage migration, you can move virtual hard disks from one physical storage location to another physical storage location. And this could be either from one volume to another volume on the same host, or you might even move it across the network out to a different host altogether. And here's the coolest part of all. You can perform this storage migration while the virtual machine is still running, and without any real significant interruption or down time. So to demonstrate this, I'm on a Windows Server 2016 computer, that has the Hyper-V Role installed. Here in the Server Manager we're going to go up to the Tools menu and select the Hyper-V Manager. Here in the Hyper-V Manager, I would like to point out one thing. And that is you can see here I'm on HOST-1 and one additional thing I should mention before we move forward is that I have actually created a second computer here called HOST-2 which is nothing more than another member server in our domain, and it has the Hyper-V role installed. But nothing else has been done, there's no virtual machines created. No virtual hard drives have been created. I will say I did create a folder for where virtual hard disks would go, and I shared it. And actually I'll tell ya what, Let me show you that right now. So I'm going to go ahead and just click on Start, just on the Start button here and type in \\host-2\vhds. You can see that right here, the VHDs. Okay so there is a folder that I can go to, where these VHDs can be stored, but it's empty for right now. So here we have our demo virtual machine, and you can see that it is running. What I'm going to do is I'm going to right click on it and select Move. This takes you into the move and then whatever the virtual machine name is, wizard. You get your typical before you begin overview screen so we'll just click Next through that. And now I have two main choices. I can move the entire virtual machine, and that would be part of something called the live migration which I will show you in a different video, or we could move the virtual machine's storage. That's what we want to do here. So I'm going to click Next. I can choose whether I want to move everything, all the data related to the virtual machine over to some single location somewhere else. I could choose to move the different data to different places and I could also choose to move only the virtual hard disks. And the reason by the way, that we're seeing here the option for other data is there is other data that goes along with the virtual machine checkpoints and things like that. So I want to move just the virtual hard disks in this particular instance. So I'm going to go ahead and click on Next. And now it wants to know what virtual hard disks I want to move. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to deselect Another VHD, that's just a spare hard drive that's actually sitting blank. I'm going to intentionally leave the Demo VM VHDX file checked because that's the one that the operating system is actually installed on and running on on this particular machine. So I'm going to go ahead and click Next. I need to give a location where I want to put it, so I'm going to put in \\host-2\vhds, Next, and Finish. At this point it will perform the move. And it's kind of hard for you to see, you can't see. I can't move this window to show you that the virtual machine is actually still running. Okay, but it does do this process while the machine is running. If I were to go into the virtual machine, again I don't have it open. But if I was on it, you would see that I wouldn't be interrupted. I would still be able to do everything that I would do regardless of this move. So as you can see this does take a little bit of time, and if you're doing this with me, your machine might be taking longer or maybe it's already done. I don't know. And if you're following along, you can go ahead and pause and just resume when it's finished. Okay so you can see that it has finished, and here in the back ground Demo VM is still running. And I want to go back to the Settings for the Demo VM, 'cause I want to show you that if we look at our two hard drives, if I go to another VHD, you'll see here that's on the local C drive. Right, that's where we put it. But if I click on Demo VM, you'll see that that is now out in a network location. It's out on Host-2. So you can see that this process all worked. And that's how easy storage migration is. If you need to move something from one place to another. So if you have a situation where maybe one volume is getting full, and you bought a new hard drive and you want to go ahead and move it there, now you know how to do it. Or maybe another scenario might be you decided to move out to some kind of network based storage instead of local storage. Again as I showed ya here, moved it across the network with no problem. And that's how storage migration works.