Migrating A VMware VM To Different Storage

[SaavyGolfer]

Hello all,

I'm new to Veeam and the forums so I hope my questions haven't been answered 20 times already, but I did do some searching and I couldn't find any answers to my particular questions.

First off here is my environment:

1. Two HP DL360 Gen 8 servers as my ESXi servers running vSphere 6.0 - They are not identical, but close, they have different version processors: 1 Server has two E5-2640 processors and the other Server
has two E5-2640 v2 processors.
2. vSphere Essentials 6 - So no vMotion or Storage vMotion - We have vCenter licensing we just haven't deployed VCSA yet to manage hosts, so each host is currently managed individually.
2. NAS as our datastore for most of the VM's, some VM's are running on the local storage of each ESXi server.
3. Veeam Backup Free Edition 9.5.

I guess the next thing to state is that I'm fairly new to administering VMware/vSphere and using Veeam, so I'm learning under fire so to speak. I administer a small vSphere environment consisting of two ESXi servers with about 10 VM's on each server, (not using vCenter yet), we use some local storage and network attached storage for our VM datastores, and we are using Veeam Backup Free Edition 9.5 to perform backups and to migrate VM's if necessary or to change storage locations.

I might have to replace our current NAS device that hosts the majority of our VM's with a new device, I'm pretty sure it's going bad. If that happens, I would need to migrate all of my VM's that are located on that NAS device to other storage devices we have, then back to to the replacement NAS device.

So I guess my first question is: When I want to move a VM to another datastore what's the best method to achieve this with Veeam Backup Free Edition? From my limited Veeam knowledge, I'm guessing that I would perform a Quick Migration and just migrate the VM to the same host it is already on and just select another datastore on the Quick Migration Wizard? So for example, Quick Migration SQL01 from ESXi01->ESXi01 but change the datastore location from NAS01 to NAS02? Is this the correct way to do this, or is there a better way or recommended way that I've missed?

My second question is: This is where my limited knowledge of VMware comes in.....And the utterly convoluted licensing of MS... If you migrate a VM the way I explained above, what does that do to the specs of the VM, meaning does it essentially become a new VM on new hardware, or is it just the same exact VM hardware wise just located on different storage etc? My concern is how Windows Server licensing sees this. We only have Standard Windows Server licensing which if I understand correctly doesn't allow unlimited migrating from host A to host B unless you have specific licensing. For example, we have a server running Server 2016 Standard and SQL 2017 Standard. If I would Quick Migrate that server to the same host and just change the storage location, would that screw up the Server 2016 and SQL licensing, or since I'm still on the same host then nothing would change except the storage location? I sure as heck don't want to migrate a server like that and then have the licensing wig out and SQL services not start up.

I hope I didn't ramble on too much, I am just trying to be thorough on my situation and questions. If you need more info please don't hesitate to ask.

Thanks in advance for anyone's input and time on this,

-Jeff

[foggy]

Hi Jeff, yes, you can use Quick Migration to migrate the VM to another datastore. As for your second question, please review this thread, should give you the answer. Thanks!