Upgrade ESXi without virtual machine downtime in situations where virtual machine disks must be moved to shared storage to allow migration with vMotion.

Perform storage maintenance and reconfiguration. You can use Storage vMotion to move virtual machines off a storage device to allow maintenance or reconfiguration of the storage device without virtual machine downtime.

Redistribute storage load. You can use Storage vMotion to manually redistribute virtual machines or virtual disks to different storage volumes to balance capacity or improve performance.