Importing Large Physical Machine (5TB)

[skroesen]

We have a GIS server with a large 5TB drive (currently just under 2TB in use). We are trying to retire the hardware it is one and move it into VMware. With the 2TB limitiation on volumes in vSphere does anyone have any suggestions on how to accomplish this?

[weinstein5]

Sepensing on the tool you use you can resize drives - so you can P2V the machine resizing the drive to a 2 TB limit and then add additional drives as you need additional storage -

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[Troy_Clavell]

...and ensure if this is a single drive, you have a LUN with a 8MB block size.

[skroesen]

To make sure I have this right...

Resize the current volume to under 2TB so I can P2V it to vSphere. If I have the need to increase the drive size in the future beyond the 2TB limit I will have to add an extent to the volume and within Windows span drives if I wish to make it keep appearing as one drive?

[Troy_Clavell]

no... An extent will increase the VMFS volume (and I wouldn't recommend this. Lose one extend, and well.....), but you are still bound to a single HDD of 2TB minus 512bytes

[skroesen]

So lose the extend and just add an additional volume under 2TB and create a new VMDK and present to VM and then span in windows?

[Troy_Clavell]

what I meant was if you use extents and one of the LUNS you are using for the extent is corrupted, well that entire VMFS volume is lost. You will to present another HDD to your guest.

[skroesen]

Okay, I gave you bad information. The free space is on the drive is just under 2TB. The used space is 3.08TB. I misunderstood the server owner apparently after I just checked on everything myself. Soryy.

This changes things now since we are now above the 2TB limit from the start. Now I am not sure what could work.

[vmroyale]

Hello.

What kind of storage are you using on the backend?

Good Luck!

[Troy_Clavell]

This is all local storage? The other thing you may be able to do is create an ISCSI initiator from your new guest OS, create a LUN from the SAN and use ISCSI to connect to the storage. Then maybe robocopy the data to the new VM.

[skroesen]

Currently, it is a DL360 (bare metal) with a LUN from a CX3-20.

Looking to move it off the 360 and the 3-20 into the cluster and targeting a newer AX4-5. Both are FC

[Svedja]

You could always do a two step migration

*) Move the application to virtual machine (P2V) first, leaving the data on the LUN but reconnect using Vmware RDM

*) Convert RDM to virtual disk (very easy) with Vmware cold migrate.

maximums : http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r41/vsp_41_config_max.pdf (page 😎

converting with RDM : http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=100319...

RDM to Virtual disk : http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=100524...

Then, i'm surprised that Vmware still have 2TB as a maximum for

filesize and even more surprised that RDMs seems to be limited to 2TB

too.