P2V Test: Best way to address a mapped LUN

[m1dget1nab1k1n1]

Hi everyone,

I have been tasked with testing a P2V migration of a business critical Human Resources server. The server is a Windows 2003 box with a local C: drive, as well as 2 LUN's on our FC SAN approximately 200GB each in size..

I'd like to confirm the best way to be able to P2V this machine, and present the two LUN's to the newly created VM.

I need to be able to revert back to the physical box if the P2V testing is deemed unsucessful. This means the 2 LUN's need to remain unchanged and need to be able to be remapped to the physical server if things go sour.

My though was to simply create a RDM to both LUN's and present it to the VM. I am not sure however if this has any impact on the LUN's, and if it would prevent a failback scenario.

Any clarification would be greatly welcomed.

Thank you.

[a_p_]

Welcome to the Community,

The safest way would be to create clones of the LUNs on your storage and use the clones for testing. If this is not an option and you can afford some downtime of the server, you could shut down the server, coldclone the C: drive, present the 2 LUNs to the ESX(i) hosts and map them to the converted VM as virtual RDMs. Before powering on the VM make sure you create a snapshot. This way all changes on the 2 LUNs go to the snapshot file rather than to the to the LUN itself. Depending on your needs, you may also consider to configure the virtual network to use an internal only vSwitch or uncheck "Connect on Power on" to keep it away from the production LAN.

André