ESXi - Storage Containers/Datastores and vMotion Operation Limits | Nutanix Community
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We are planning a major migration from existing 3-tier ESXi over to Nutanix/ESXi (AHV to come later). Due to time constraints in our move, we are trying to optimize how many VM's can migrate at one time. VMware has a few well-known limits on their operations:



vMotion operations per host (10Gb/s network) - 8

vMotion operations per datastore - 128

Storage vMotion operations per host - 2

Storage vMotion operations per datastore - 8



If I take a "one storage container to rule them all" approach, I will be limited to 8 migrations at once, as long as I spread out my migrations to 4 hosts. My target will be a 14 node cluster, so I would like to push up to 28 operations, if at all possible. Would it be considered a best-practice to carve out 4 storage containers, knowing I'm still in the same pool, and fan out the migrations to get around these limits?



My goal is to saturate my 10Gbit inter-datacenter link. Yes, I like to push the limits (break things?). Would the multi-datastore/container approach be advisable here?



Target Nutanix Cluster - 14 node NX-8155-G6 Hybrid



Thanks,

--Blake
Hi @BlakeRobertsNBL



Nutanix recommends having single storage pool with a single storage container unless there is a specific reason to have multiple storage containers, like container with different data reductions features enabled or encryption.



In your case, you will create different container just to allow more than 8 simultaneous storage vMotion which I believe will not be a problem, but after finish the migration, you may can consider consolidate all migrated VMs in a single storage container and delete the other 3.
Yes, after the migration, we would plan on reducing down to a single storage container, especially considering we will be investigating a conversion to AHV after the migration.



We just wanted to make sure that creating multiple containers to workaround VMWare's limits would be a viable option without cratering the cluster/storage pool.



Thanks
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