To perform vMotion, environments with shared storage are not required. For example, you can vMotion VMs between ESXi hosts with only local storage. Migrating a VM cross-cluster, the target cluster VM might not have access to the source cluster's storage.

vMotion without shared storage can be useful during infrastructure administration tasks, such as the following:

• Host maintenance: You can move VMs to a different host to allow maintenance of the host
• Storage maintenance and reconfiguration: VMs can be moved to another storage to allow maintenance or reconfiguration without VM downtime
• Storage load redistribution: To improve performance or to balance capacity, VMs can be redistributed to different storage volumes