I recently had a issue with disk space (ESXi 5.1.0, no vMotion). A VM with a thin provisioned disk expanded to a point the hypervisor wouldn't run it (wanted to consolidate-no snapshots; couldn't start OS, VM was pretty much locked up in vSphere Cient).
As I had another datastore disk that was unused I decided to move the VM to that disk.
I tried to move it using the datastore browser. After about 44% the move failed. So I tried copying it. At about 44% it failed. The VM was approximately 64GB in size. The destination disk was ~230GB. I then removed the VM from inventory and rebooted the hypervisor. I tried to copy and again it failed @ ~44%. I then SSH'd in and tried to do a copy using the cp command (even though I'd read elsewhere not to do this). Again the copy failed.
As this was Sunday and I needed to get it going I deleted the VM from disk, created a new VM (on the unused datastore) and restored the OS from a Windows Backup. This time I decided to not use thin provisioning.
So the questions I have -
In a situation as I was in was moving the VM to another datastore the right path?
Why didn't the copy/move complete? Is there a size limit to copy/moves?