VMWare's coolest new feature: Storage VMotion

I've just gone through the rigmarole of upgrading (nearly) our entire VMware ESX installation to the latest version, ESX 3.5.  After doing some testing, I thought it would make the most sense to get it up and running ahead of the Microsoft Patch Tuesday cycle since a) there's a VMware Tools upgrade that should take place for all Virtual Machines which requires a restart and b) most of our VMs are running Windows.

The other thing that I was looking forward to is Storage VMotion.  In the throes of our IBM SAN disaster at the beginning of the month, we employed a secondary site's SAN storage to host our most critical Virtual Machines.  The VMs' CPU, Networking, and Memory were still hosted in the main DataCenter, but their storage was migrated to the secondary DataCenter.  At the time, running ESX 3.0.2, we had to turn off the VM, first, in order to transfer the virtual disk files to another data store.

In ESX 3.5, with Storage VMotion, basically you can transfer the virtual disk files from one SAN to another with zero downtime.  This is the last remaining piece of the VMotion feature set, covering the full range of virtual hardware.

In the world of server virtualization, this is the New Hotness.