P2V Physical server that has SAN attached storage

[anthonypoh]

Does anyone have experience using converter to P2V a physical server that has SAN attached storage presented to it?

I've got a W2K3 server (file server) which I wish to virtualise that has a 3TB LUN presented to it. I just want to understand how converter deals with large disks......

Looking at the converter user guide, it says on pg49:

IMPORTANT: Converter Standalone cannot detect any source volumes and file systems that are located on physical disks larger than 2TB.

I'm assuming this means that I can't convert SAN attached storage which has a LUN larger than 2TB?

Am I able to just unpresent the 3TB LUN from the physical server, and then present it to the ESX host and attach it to the P2V'd VM as a RDM disk? Will this work (assuming it won't corrupt the data on the LUN)?

Any other suggestions on P2Ving servers with large SAN attached storage?

[a_p_]

The approach to unpresent the 3TB LUN from the source and present it to the converted VM as a RDM in physical compatibility (pass-trough) mode will work as long as the ESXi hosts runs ESXi 5.0. With presenting the LUN to the ESXi host and attaching it to the VM as a RDM there will be no modifications on the LUN itself.

André

[eeg3]

Is this an iSCSI SAN? If you don't want to use RDMs, you can use the software initiator inside the guest. You will want to make sure your host networking can accomodate the throughput needed for that, of course.