Questions on datastore/ESX VMware

[netappmagic]

I am new to integrate NetApp storage to VMware environment. So, my question may sound very basic.

If I understand correctly, a LUN or a NFS share could be understood as a datastore, and in order to share it between multiple ESX hosts, these hosts have to be clustered together. Multiple datastores could be shared by the same cluster. Such envionment could be managed by Vsphere web console. Am I right so far?

If, for instance, 2 datastores are shared by a cluster, any way I can move a virtual machine from one datastore to the other?

Also, can a datastore be shared by mulitple different ESX clusters?

Thank you very much in advance!

[johannbell · Accepted solution]

Yes, a LUN or NFS export can be used as an ESX datastore.

If you have an NFS export, you don't need to create a LUN, as ESX can talk NFS natively.

An ESX cluster can share datastores, which is the key functionality of ESX clustering.

You can move a VM between datastores, this is known as 'Storage vMotion'. And you can move VMs between any type of data store, iSCSI, FCP or FCoE using VMFS, or NFS. You will need the correct VMware licensing to do this.

A datastore cannot be shared by multiple ESX clusters.