Recommdations/Best Practices on moving hard disks between different RHEL VMs?

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I don't know if I'm asking this question correctly, so please bear with me. I don't see a best practice from VMWare online.

From searching online, I see that Windows Admins are able to move Virtual Disks from one VM to another and I was wondering if there were any recommendations/best practices when it came to moving hard disks from one RHEL VM to another RHEL VM.

https://communities.vmware.com/thread/465345?start=0&tstart=0


1)  Power off the VM from where the HDD need to be moved

2)  Remove Virtual Hard Disk from VM

3)  go to the other VM and right click and edit settings

4) go to hard disk option and add the existing VMDK.from the datastore.

5) power on the VM.

I'm thinking it won't be as straight forward with RHEL VMs. I was thinking of some of the variables when moving from one RHEL VM to another RHEL VM, such as:

  • Underlying storage of SAN (format of LUNs)
  • Different versions of RHEL (5, 6 and 7)
  • Different file system types (say moving an EXT3 hard disk to an OS that only has EXT4, and taking into account xfs)
  • Different hardware architecture (such as x32 and x86_64)
  • What the purpose of that hard disk or what was stored on it (say hard disks that were dedicated to Oracle and then moved to another RHEL VM that has Oracle running on it, say as a host backup, possibly)

Maybe I'm overthinking this, however I don't think it will be to easy to just power off the RHEL VM and then move it to another RHEL VM.

I'm just wondering what others have done or if there is a good way to do this going from one RHEL VM to another RHEL VM.

thanks

CM

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