P2V of NFS storage mounted within a VM

[a2alpha]

Hi,

I am looking for the best method to acheive the following:

We currently have a Server 2008 R2 Virtual Machine with its base operating system disk located within the virtual environmnet (vSphere 5, ESXi 5 Update1). Within this machine are two additional drives provided by our EMC SAN using the Microsoft iSCSI Initiator within the VM. This our main file server.

We would like to take advantage of the virtual backup software we are using (Veeam 6.1) so would like to move these disks into the virtual environment as VMDKs.

I know potentially we could create two new VMDKs and sync the data across but is there a way of cloning those to preserve all the permissions etc.

Any advice would be appreciated!

Thanks,

Dan

[vmroyale]

Note: Discussion successfully moved from vSphere Upgrade & Install to Backup & Recovery

How big are these NTFS volumes, and how much growth is there associated with them? You are going to be limited to 2TB - 512bytes for a single VMDK if you want to leverage snapshots this way.

[a2alpha]

Thanks for the fast response.

One of the drives is 1TB the other is 300GB. Company Data and User home drives respectively.

As it is less than the 2TB limit and I don't envisage a massive expansion, that was another factor in moving them to VMDKs as there is no need for the RDM / iSCSI connected storage.

[vmroyale]

There are several ways you could get this done, but I think the fastest way would be to remove these NTFS volumes from the iSCSI initiator in the guest and then present the same volumes back to the ESXi hosts(s) where they could be added to the guest as RDMs in virtual compatibility mode. These can have snapshots on them.

[a2alpha]

Would Veeam then be able to back them up / replicate them if we did this?

[vmroyale · Accepted solution]

It appears so, but I don't use Veeam Backup and Replication so I can't tell you for sure.

[a2alpha]

Fantastic, thank you for your help on this - potentially i am thinking that I could convert the current storage as you say to being Virtual Mode RDMs and then replicate them. That would actually make a VM comprised of entirely VMDK disks which once verified, could take over from the current machine.

Certainly gives me enough to get started, so thank you.

Dan