Migrating and relocating VMs is a great feature in Virtualized environments. You can do migration and perform your maintenance without disrupting any service. Migration in VMware is easy by utilizing vMotion in vCenter. You right click on VM, then choose Migrate and follow the instructions. But how we can relocate (change datastore or storage vMotion) a VM in vCloud Director?
Actually I was expecting the procedure in vCloud Director to be similar to vCenter, but when I right-clicked on the VM, I couldn’t find a ‘Migrate’ option or something like that. And apparently it’s not a good practice to migrate a VM which is controlled by vCloud Director through vCenter. But fortunately storage vMotion is possible in vCloud Director if you have separate Storage Profiles. To do this kind of relocation, right-click on the VM, then choose ‘Properties’; in ‘General’ tab you will find a pulldown menu for changing Storage Profile. Simply change Storage Profile to the desired one and bingo! Storage will be changed. You can even see the progress of relocation in vCenter.

Some tips:

• As mentioned, changing datastore is possible if proper storage profiles are defined in the environment. That being said, it’s not possible to relocate to an individual, specific datastore. Actually, storage profile is another abstract layer over storage infrastructure that is being used by vCloud Director. To be honest, I didn’t have deeply realized what’s the main purpose of introducing storage profile and storage capability yet and why it doesn’t use datastore cluster instead. By the way, keep in mind that you need to create separate storage profiles if you have separate storages and you want more flexibility in vCloud. To get more information, look at this link: Using Storage Profiles with vCloud Director.
• I couldn’t find much resources on the effects of migrating a VM from one host to another in vCloud Director environment; it is possible to perform this in vCenter and I did it in some cases with no issues. I suppose vCloud Director is working on higher level and will be notified of the changes.