A way to relocate VMs or their disks to other ESXi hosts or datastores, using vMotion or Storage vMotion when available and Veeam's own mechanism when not. It is also how an Instant Recovery gets completed.
Read more: Veeam Help Center
In the Ultra Transcenders books
Each book explains Quick Migration in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.
Terms in this definition
- Virtual machines
Infrastructure-as-a-service compute giving complete control of the operating system, making it a fit for lift-and-shift moves and for software relying on OS-level pieces like COM.
- ESX
VMware's bare-metal hypervisor, installed on each host in a VCF fleet. Up to version 9.0 it was known as ESXi.
- vMotion
Moves a running VM to another host with no downtime; its storage counterpart, Storage vMotion, relocates the files between datastores instead.
- Storage vMotion
Relocates a powered-on VM's files and virtual disks between datastores with no outage; the host can stay the same or change at the same time.
- Instant Recovery
Starts a workload straight from a backup mounted to a host, getting it running within minutes, though slower until moved to production. Azure, Nutanix AHV, Hyper-V and vSphere are supported targets.
Related terms
- ColdMigration
In Quick Migration, Veeam falls back to this mode when CPUs on the two hosts do not match or the VM has more than 8 GB of memory: the VM is shut down, recent disk changes are moved, and it starts on the new host. Otherwise SmartSwitch is used.
- SmartSwitch
With compatible CPUs on both hosts, Quick Migration can pause the VM, carry its configuration and post-snapshot disk changes to the new host and resume it there. ColdMigration is the alternative, which powers the VM off, copies it and powers it back on.
- VMware backup proxy
The data-moving workhorse for vSphere jobs: it reads VM disks from production storage, then encrypts, deduplicates and compresses the data before sending it to a repository or to a second proxy. Restores, Quick Migration, replication and backup all rely on one, and a freshly installed backup server takes the role by default.
- vSphere datastore
Where VM files live in vSphere, whether on VMFS, NFS, vSAN or vVols. Veeam's restore, replication, failback and Quick Migration wizards ask you to pick one as the destination.