I have a physical server that has a 100GB internal hard drive with Windows Server 2003 installed. I use this server to store index files for my email archive solution. Since the internal hard drive did not have enough storage space for these indexes we carved out a 300GB LUN on my Netapp filer. We use Microsoft's iSCSI initator along with Snapdrive (Netapps utiltity for manage LUNs) to present this LUN to this server. I have a 300GB E drive on this server to store these indexes.
What happens if I want to do a P2V on this server? All of my virtual machines are stored on an NFS volume on my Netapp filer.
P2V will see this as any other local drive and migrate it to a new volume on the virtual server. You will be able to do the resize process prior to migration.
As this will take an age to migrate you may want to unmount this volume prior to P2V and then mount it on your virtual machine once migrated.
Wow, that sounds quite easy. I do have a related question. In the last two weeks we migrated all of our VMs from an iSCSI LUN to an iSCSI NFS share after reading about all the advantages of using NFS for VMs.
If I do the P2V on this server and it has an iSCSI LUN presented to it right now, once the migration is finished, will I still be using a LUN or will this index data not get stored under my NFS share?
When you run the P2V the new virtual machine disk will be created on LUNs presented to your VMWare hosts. You will get a choice during the P2V setup process as to which LUN you would like to create the new virtual machine onto.
