Skip to main content
Solved

Which is the best way to migrate production VMs between containers?

  • January 29, 2026
  • 1 reply
  • 33 views

Daniel Martinez
Forum|alt.badge.img+1

Hi

I’m in the process of designing a Metro Availability architecture between two identical AHV clusters, with each site having its own Prism Central.

The first cluster has already been deployed, and some VMs have been migrated to it from the customer’s legacy VMware environment. Once those VMs were running on the first AHV cluster, I assigned them a temporary local Protection Policy (within the same cluster and PC) as a precaution, in case a restore was needed during the following days. The idea is to have at least 1 daily recovery point with a retention of 7 days.

At the moment, all these VMs are located in the cluster’s default container. In order to implement Metro Availability between both clusters, my understanding is that I need to:

  • Create a new container with the same name on both clusters 

  • Migrate the VMs from the default container to this new Metro container

  • Then create the sync policy between both sites

  • etc.

Since these VMs are already in production, I’d like to minimize service impact as much as possible.

My questions are:

  1. What is the recommended and safest way to migrate production VMs from the default container to a new container? Is storage live migration the preferred approach, or are there any caveats or best practices to consider? 

  2. What happens to the existing recovery points created by the local Protection Policy once the VM is migrated to a different container? Should those recovery points (or the temporary Protection Policy) be removed before migrating the VMs?

 

Thanks in advance!

Best answer by JeroenTielen

Easiest method is updating the virtual machine in Prism Central, go to the disk and select the storage container where you want the disk to be placed. This is “live migration” only is is doing snapshots under the hood. You will not have data loss. 

 

If you need to do a lots of disks then you can create a script and do it via command line. (acli vm.update_container VM_NAME container=CONTAINER_NAME wait=false)

 

Existing recovery point will stay and are taking up storage in the original container. Better is to remove those recovery points as well. 

1 reply

JeroenTielen
Forum|alt.badge.img+8
  • Vanguard
  • Answer
  • January 30, 2026

Easiest method is updating the virtual machine in Prism Central, go to the disk and select the storage container where you want the disk to be placed. This is “live migration” only is is doing snapshots under the hood. You will not have data loss. 

 

If you need to do a lots of disks then you can create a script and do it via command line. (acli vm.update_container VM_NAME container=CONTAINER_NAME wait=false)

 

Existing recovery point will stay and are taking up storage in the original container. Better is to remove those recovery points as well.