topic Re: Moving a VMware disk drive from one guest to a different guest in VMware Solutions Discussions

Moving a VMware disk drive from one guest to a different guest

bghanson — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 14:42:36 GMT

I have a question about moving drives attached to a VM guest. I have a DBA the wants me to great a VM guest with ten (10) 1 GB drives, five (5) on SAS disks and five (5) on SATA disks. I will be using A NetApp FAS 8020 to host these drives. My question is can I and if so how would I, detach a drive (VMDK file) from this VM guest and reattach it to a different VM Guest. The drive will be holding historical data and not an application or the OS. The VM guest will be running Linux 7 with an Oracle DB. The DBA will take care of mounting the disk once it had been moved and presented to the other VM guest. Currently the NetApp is attached as NFS using an iSCSI adapter.

Re: Moving a VMware disk drive from one guest to a different guest

asulliva — Fri, 18 Aug 2017 16:52:32 GMT

Assuming the source and destination VMs have the same operating system, it's as simple as:

Shutdown the source VM (optional, but recommended, depending on the guest OS)
Detach the drive (don't delete the files)
Attach the drive to the destination VM. When it asks if you want to create a new drive, chose the option to use an existing drive, then browse to the folder for the source VM and attach it

If you want to clean up the location of the VMDKs (i.e. put them all in the same folder on the datastore), the easiest way is to do an SvMotion.

Andrew

Re: Moving a VMware disk drive from one guest to a different guest

Manchun — Tue, 03 Oct 2017 06:51:48 GMT

I am also facing this issue, how can i resolve. i am also asking from https://www.janbasktraining.com/courses/vmware