Moving a disk to another LUN

[RajThas]

Hi,

We have run out of room on our SAN and would like to upgrade it with larger disks.  To do this I was told to do a complete back up, replace disks and restore.  But I am looking for another solution as I'm not a fan of the backup and restore method.

SERVER1 - 2 Disks

C Drive on LUN1

D Drive on LUN2

I have added couple disks and created LUN3.  I would like to temporarly move everything from LUN2 to LUN3.  The server can be powered down.  How can I obtain this?  I'm using thick pervionsing.

ESXi 4.0

vSphere 4.1

Thanks

[onoski]

Do you have the option on using storage vmotion? Provide a brief summary of your virtual infrastructure setup so as to give you a better response.

[sparrowangelste]

you can also export to ovf and then reimport if storage vmotion isnt an option.

[Gav0]

assuming these LUNS are presented as Datastores you could simply svmotion the VM's from LUN2 to LUN3.

if svmotion isnt an option you can power down the VM's>right click on LUN2>browse datastore>and move/copy the VM's to LUN3 - you could also use something like Veeam Backup and FASTscp to do the copy- but the vm's must be powered off.

please provide more details of your environment

[nshetty]

Hello,

If the datastore is a shared datastore then you could use storage vmotion to move all the disk files from one datastore to another. If you do not have licensing for storage vmotion then you would have to power off the VM and then you would be able to perform storage vmotion.

Using storage vmotion you could move a single disk (vmdk) or all the files using the advanced option during migration.

Howver, if you would want to perform a clone then you could perform a hot clone from Vcenter or use cold clone, run the command from the ESXi host that has both the storage devices mapped

vmkfstools -i /vmfs/volumes/source datastore/VMfolder/VM.vmdk /vmfs/volumes/destination datastore/Vm folder/Vm_clone.vmdk

Note: this would create a clone of the VM disk on the destination datastore.

If you would want to use VMware converter then you could do so to create a copy of a VM from one host to another host and datastore.

Converter also allows you to increase or decrease the disk size. Make sure the network adapter is unchecked during conversion.

Hope you found this helpful

--Nitin Shetty