P2V Server with SAN Connection

[schnj65]

I would like to P2V a Dell 2650 server with an Emulex Fibre Channel connection to an EMC Clariion CX700. The server has been zoned to see a 100 GB LUN and powerpath is running in Windows 2003.

1 - If I do a Cold P2V 3 conversion, will the Emulex drivers load in Windows PE or do I need to add them to the ISO file (or do I need to do the Hot Conversion?)?

2 - Can I make this even more straightforward and swing the existing LUN over to the virtual machine as a Raw disk (after P2Ving all Windows disks except the SAN LUN)

3 - I have DRS and VMotion working well - do Raw Device Mappings place restrictions on VMotion (which in turn affects DRS). Any ill effects on HA or VCB? I am assuming that as long as I zone all ESX servers in the cluster so that they all see the RDM, then I should be fine. I also ask this question in prep for some Windows Clusters that require RDM's

Regards

[admin]

1. You'll have to boot up the Boot CD to see if any disks are detected on the SAN. With a hot conversion, Windows already sees the SAN disks and therefore there is no issue.

2. Just create a new VM, create a Mapped SAN LUN as a virtual disk, and then you can run Converter's Configure on the VM. You should back up the SAN LUN prior to doing this.

3. Having a Mapped SAN LUN (RDM) will not prevent a VMotion as long as both hosts can see the LUN. However, clustered VMs using Windows MSCS cannot be VMotioned. This is because MSCS is supported only if each cluster node has the boot disk on local storage, not on SAN storage.