Migrate VMWare hosted VM-100 storage risks...

[LCMember4427]

Hi,
We have a VM-100 running under VMWare vSphere 7 on a brand new Dell R640 host.  However its datastore (with its VM files and folders) are located in a iSCSI SAN where the controller is starting to get flakey.

Hence I would like to either clone OR migrate its datastore folder to the R640's internal datastore so I can remedy the SAN controller problem.

My question is:  If I switch off the VM-100, can I clone its datastore folder to the R640 internal's drive and restart it from the cloned folder copy without risking that the VM-100 license gets invalidated?  

If yes, what is an absolutely bulletproof procedure to move a VM-100's datastore folder?  I only have a very small timeframe to do this in, so I just need to be sure to get it up and running again safely with no hassles....

Thanks for comments

Tor

[LCMember4427]

I ask because the former time we needed to migrate the same VM-100 from a really old host I had requested our Palo support provider for help since we couldn't accept more than some minutes of downtime. 

They disabled our current license in the PAN portal as per the book before closing down the 'old' VM-100.  However when starting the cloned copy on the new host it refused to access the internet without a license because 'the allowed number of security zones was exceeded'.  And with no internet access they had no access to our license portal where our current license was waiting to be activated.  As we have 10+ security zones in our config, the 'normal' way of painless migration was not possible.  After having struggled for hours the support team finally wiped out our config and started from scratch with two zones and from that imported our 10+ zones setup...   But we were offline for 4 hours before they got everything up and running again....

I understand PAN's concern about not letting users run their products without a license but I think that only disabling the LOCAL zones while leaving the untrust/internet zone enabled would have provided sufficient protection against 'fraud'.    In that case we will always have an open path to the portal so any valid license could be (re)assigned in the PAN license portal to ensure painless migration or hardware upgrades... 

In any case it's in my opinion a really bad idea to deny access to the portal you badly need in order to activate your own licenses....