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devicemanager
Contributor
Contributor

Moving servers from one host/datastore to another question...

I have been running a bunch of vm's on 2 standard servers in a clustered datacenter.  I have added a new san to the mix as the 3rd host.  I want to move the vm's to the san so that if either host 1 or 2 goes down they will fail over to the other.  I'm in the process of moving the vm's from their respective datastores to the new one on the san but it asks me if I want to switch the host of the datastore.  Can someone guide me as to what is the best way to do this...

I would imagine I would want all the vms on a single host (say host 1) and the vm's on host 3 and save host 2 for host 1's failover?  Any input would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

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Bandolero865
Contributor
Contributor

Since you are only moving VMs files to the new SAN, leave the VM on the same host and just change the datastore. As for failover, you can either chose to keep all VMs on one host or spread them amongst both hosts, either way, if one host fails, VMs will be vMotioned to the running host in the event of a host failure assuming you have both HA and DRS enabled.

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CoolRam
Expert
Expert

If you have Shared datastore than yuo can keep the VM any where adn configured the failover based on the % CPU  and memory. I would suggest don't put the dedicated host for failover.

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Srinivasu13
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Right click on VM and select migrate> then choose 2nd option to migrate only Datastore.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If you found this or any other answer helpful, please consider to award points. (use Correct or Helpful buttons) Regards, Srini
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devicemanager
Contributor
Contributor

Well here my situation...

Host 1 and Host 2 are regular servers with slower hard drives.  They have 144 gb ram each  and 1tb of storage each.  The new SAN has 144 gb ram, and 3tb storage 15k rpm drives raid 10.

I understand what you guys are saying about leaving the hosts the way they are and just moving the vm files to the san.  But, wouldn't it make more sense to put the vm all on say host 1 and in the event it fails all I would have to do is reboot host 2?  I do plan on utilizing vmotion and having HA in place.  Im just trying to figure out the best way to approach this.  If you guys say just move the vm's and leave the hosts the way they are - then that's why I will do.  Just needed you to know that the drives are slower on host 1 and 2 and if that matters in this equation...  Thank you.

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rcporto
Leadership
Leadership

Your "SAN/Storage" are a fibre channel / NFS / iSCSI storage ? Or just hard drives connected locally inside of each host ? If this is just local hard drives, you cannot achieve high availability that you want, since if one of host fail, the other hosts will not able to restart the VMs from the failed hosts since they will not have access to the VMs files.

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Richardson Porto
Senior Infrastructure Specialist
LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/richardsonporto
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devicemanager
Contributor
Contributor

I just want there to be a central datastore on my san.  I will be conntecting iSCSI but havent configured that yet.  I currently am running 4 1gps connections on each server connected to a central switch.  This is a smaller office but want the redundancy of High Availability. 

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devicemanager
Contributor
Contributor

Well that last response got me thinking and I'm just nervous about proceeding the wrong way.

I do plan on making an iSCSI connection via the VMware software.  I have some virtual switches that I created because of some latency issues, I'm going to delete those.  I am going to move the vm files to the san.  My question is do I create the iSCSI connection first or does it matter if its afterwards?  Also any other advice would be greatly appreciated.  Thank you.

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devicemanager
Contributor
Contributor

All in all waiting for everyone top respond.  I decided to migrate the servers to the new datastore - seems that the new datastore is not an option, infact only one datastore is available and that is the datastore in which the vm resides.  How do I get the new datastore to become accessible via the migration option?  It shows up in vCenter under datastores and the host shows up under hosts as well.  Thank you for your response.

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