Migrated vLab from datastore, now I am left with a duplicate

[mjgreen81]

Hi all,

I migrated a vLab between datastores to free up space on one of the stores. This has resulted in the vLab being duplicated and I can see it in both datastores.

I thought maybe its because I didnt change my vLab properties in veeam B&R (as it would be pointing to the original incorrect datastore), so I went back and changed this to the correct datastore in the properties.

I still seem to have the duplicated vLab.

Can anyone advise me as to what I should do?

Many thanks

[foggy]

Mike, how have you migrated the virtual lab to another datastore?

[mjgreen81]

From vShpere, Home >> Inventory >> Datastores

find datastore holding vlab

Right Click Migrate >> Change datastore

[foggy]

Is there a chance that the migration was not fully successful (and therefore the source VM was not removed from the source datastore)? Anyway, this seems to be more VMware-related issue to me.

What you can do is to simply check whether the target lab is operational (by connecting to the migrated lab and trying to perform some task with it). I assume the source lab can be removed (either manually or through the Veeam B&R console) after making sure the target one is ok.

[mjgreen81]

Yeah I was thinking that was the obvious thing to try....

I will run a surebackup job and check which vLab it uses. Hopefully it will use the new one and will have no problems. I will give some feedback shortly

[mjgreen81]

My surebackup job is running at the moment and it looks like the VM's are being created in the new datastore which is good news. If however I go to

Home >> Inventory >> VMs and templates

Click on my 'Live' vLab

And look at summary >> Resources I can see that both the new and old datastores are shown under 'storage'

[mjgreen81]

Ok, think I am happy to get rid of the duplicate in my original datastore.

Just as a bit of reassurance, can you confirm how I should do this?

Is it simply right click on the vLab located on the old datastore and 'delete from disk'? Or another way?

[foggy]

Is it simply right click on the vLab located on the old datastore and 'delete from disk'? Or another way?

Yes, you can try to delete it from disk, however I would backup this VM prior to deleting it. Just in case, because of that mostly:

And look at summary >> Resources I can see that both the new and old datastores are shown under 'storage'

[mjgreen81]

I risked it without backing up and lost the VM. Doh, should have listened to you!

Oh well, no major problem as I have recreated my vLab from scratch and all is well.

Thanks for your excellent help as always Foggy, much appreciated.

[cffit]

Is moving a virtual lab as simple as moving it in vsphere and Veeam will pick up on it with no changes there? I see within the vlab you can set the datastore for the redo logs, but that's the temp files that the backed up machines use, not where the vlab actually lives on storage.

[cffit]

I figured it out, and I figured out why mjgreen81 probably had it showing up in two places after the move.. the VM for the lab has both a CD and Floppy mounted, and when you move the VM those iso and flp images stay with the old datastore, thus leaving what looks like a second copy of the VM in the original location. Here's what I did to get it to work:

1. Migrate the VM to the new datastore
2. Go to the VM listed on the old datastore and set the cd and floppy to be Client Device. After this, the old VM should disappear from the original location in vCenter.
3. Explore the old datastore and find the VM folder. Move the iso and flp file to the new datastore inside of the VM virtual lab folder.
4. Go onto the VM on the new datastore and attach the flp file to the floppy drive and attach the iso file to the CD drive and set both to connect at power up.
5. At this point the old VM folder on the old datastore disappeared, but if not, and if there aren't any files on it, you could delete the old folder.

After this, everything worked for me. Had I known about this ahead of time, I could have set the floppy and cd drives to client device BEFORE I migrated it, then just made sure all the files copy over and attach them on the new location VM.