Extrasphere

Extrasphere provides unique technology of VM disks and configuration migration without downtime for a standalone VMware ESXi 5.0+ host. The migration of VM disks is totally downtime-free, while for configuration migration a very short pause of VM is required.

With Extrasphere you can perform conversion of VM disks from thin to thick and vice versa without affecting your business processes and what's most important all can be done on a completely standalone ESXi host.

All operations can be done without having VMware vCenter and you also won't need expensive vSphere license with Storage vMotion feature - Extrasphere supports even vSphere Hypervisor (free) license.

Extrasphere provides core VM migration functionality for free.

Requirements and limitations:

a) SSH must be enabled on the ESXi host (root access is required).

b) Independent and RDM (physical) disks are not supported for migration.

For successful VM migration the following requirements must be set:

a) Firewall must allow both incoming and outgoing traffic on port 22 (TCP/UDP).

b) VM virtual hardware version must be supported by the target host

c) Migration to non-shared datastore requires "Extrasphere Resharer" to be configured on the target host.