I had another question recently about whether or not the Storage vMotion behaviour of renaming VM files on a VMFS or NFS datastore also worked with Virtual Volumes or VVols? After a quick test, I can state categorically that the answer is yes. I created a VM on a Nimble Storage appliance, presented two unique storage containers (aka virtual volume datastores), deployed a test VM on one of the VVol datastores, and then renamed the VM in the vSphere web client. I then verified that the VM name in the vSphere client was different to the names of its files (or virtual volumes in this case, to be more accurate) on the VVol datastore. Finally I did a Storage vMotion of the VM to the other virtual volume datastore, and in the process I observed that all of the VM’s files/virtual volumes were renamed.

Just for completeness, here are some screenshots from the Nimble Storage VVols appliance. You can see that the name of the VM, and thus the virtual volumes/files in this case is ‘xxx’:

At this point I renamed the VM to ‘yyy’ in the vSphere web client. The virtual volumes were still names ‘xxx’. Once the Storage vMotion operation was kicked off (I chose to select “Change Datastore only”), I immediately observed the virtual volume names change to ‘yyy’ on the destination Storage Container. In Nimble Storage, the Storage Containers are simply folders that are tagged for VVols. You can see the folder name in the upper left-hand corner of the screenshot:

Good to know that this ‘housekeeping’ procedure is also available in VVols. Having the VM name and its underlying files/objects similarly names is so useful should you ever need to troubleshoot.

Of course, there is one outstanding question here. What if I only had a single Storage Container/Virtual Volume datastore? I’m not sure of the answer at this point in time, but let me try to find out.