How can a VMware datastore be moved to a different device?

As far as I'm aware, there is no quick way to migrate a datastore between block devices.

  1. Create a new datastore on Disk 2 (e.g. "DS2")
  2. Migrate your virtual machines from "TDS Server" to "DS2", by either:
    • Using Storage vMotion if you have it available within your vSphere licensing to keep the VM available during migration.
    • Shutting down each VM in turn and running an offline migration if you want to keep the disk provisioning type (e.g. Thin Provision) or using the VMware VI Client to copy/paste the files.

You can also migrate the VMs using SSH:

  1. Shut down the VM
  2. Remove it from the vSphere inventory
  3. Log into SSH, and use the mv command to move the VM's directory to the new disk
  4. Re-add the VM to the vSphere inventory by browsing the new datastore

You can't move a datastore, you have to move the data in the datastore. If you have the right licence you can just live migrate the VMs from one to the other, anything else in the datastore (ISOs etc) can just moved with the browse-datastore option.