Can we migrate a storage of one physical server to a storage of one ESXi using storage vMotion?

[ZaraRose06]

Hi,

Right now we have few physical servers in place called 'A' and need to migrate everything to the place called 'B', lots of applications running on the physical servers. 'A' and 'B' are different state. We have SAN storage in 'A' and another SAN in 'B'.

Please clarify these:

Plan A:

If we use P2V: will it take lots of time to migrate everything (size of physical machine: 200GB)

Our plan is: migrate only the 'C' drive (OS and application) of physical server to virtual using P2V. Once it is completed then using the SAN replication, migrate SAN from 'A' to 'B'.

Can you please tell me, is it a good plan?

Plan B:

Migrate only the 'C' drive (OS and application) of physical server to virtual using P2V. Once it is completed then using the storage vmotion are we able to migrate the data store of 'A' to 'B'? (Both are different state). I am not sure, we are able to migrate a data store of a physical server to virtual from one state to another???

Plan C:

Using P2V migrate everything..

Expecting valuable advice from my friends....

Please advise more solutions from your side...

Regards,

ZaraRose.

[vmroyale]

Hello,

Note: This discussion was moved from the vSphere Upgrade & Install community to the Converter community.

Plan A or C will work. Plan A has the potential to be faster, as the SAN replication could be used to seed the disk contents ahead of time. Plan A also introduces some additional complexity, as you will have to get these LUNs/volumes presented to your ESXi hosts and the new VMs. Plan C is the most simple approach, but will probably take the most time.

Good Luck!

[ZaraRose06]

That means, plan B won't work out, right?

1. I am not sure, are we able to migrate data store from 'A' to 'B' using the storage vmotion?

If the answer is no, then can you please tell me the reason?

If the answer is Yes, can you please tell the step by step process?

Thanks,

ZaraRose

[ivivanov]

Storage vMotion is designed to work with datastores. Physical servers do not have the notion of a datastore in terms of ESX. You can migrate the data using SAN replication (your plan A) but it is not storage vMotion.

[ZaraRose06]

I have one doubt, do we really need a shared storage to do the storage vmotion? Because, right now our SAN storage is located in two different state, so is it possible to migrate SAN using storage vmotion from one place to another?

Thanks,

ZaraRose.

[ivivanov]

I would say no. Storage vMotion is migrating VMs, not SANs. You can use it to relocate a VM from one datastore to another. It is not a general data transfer tool. If you have a physical source server (not VM) and it has some data stored on a SAN - it is not a datastore, therefore storage vMotion cannot recognize it.

[ZaraRose06]

I am confused, see right now we've physical servers on place 'A' and it is attached with a SAN storage. In the site 'B' we have a ESXi server and want migrate the data store from 'A' to 'B'. Can I use storage vmotion?

Thanks,

ZaraRose

[ivivanov]

Nope, you cannot.

[ZaraRose06]

Okay, then can you please tell me the reason?

As per my understanding, storage vmotion is the process of moving the storage of a running VM from one data store to another data store. A

Here i have one more confusion, do we really required a shared storage for storage vmotion?

[ivivanov]

My understanding of your initial post was that you have *physical servers* at location A, but NOT VMs. If you have physical servers you cannot use storage vMotion because they are not VMs. Are you having VMs on your source site?

[ZaraRose06]

Yes, your understanding is correct. Right now we have only the physical servers are on the site 'A'.

1. Can you please tell this thing: do we really need  shared storage for storage vmotion?

[ivivanov]

Looking at the first paragraph at http://www.vmware.com/technical-resources/virtual-storage/live-migration.html it says "Storage VMotion relocates virtual machine disk files from one shared storage location to another shared storage location", so I woul say yes - it requires shared storage.

[ZaraRose06]

Yes, there you are. It is saying  "from one shared storage location to another shared storage location", consider the first shared storage is called A and it is located in NewYork and the second shared storage is called 'B' and located in Peterson. Both are shared storage and located in different places.

According to that statement, we are able to migrate the data store, what do you think?