P2V'ing box with large SAN LUN drives

[ktwebb68]

I was asked to virtualize some Domino servers and originally said sure, no problem. After thinking about it and then looking at they physical boxes (windows) I realized they have SAN LUN's attached that house the notes databases. None are massive but there are 10 Servers and each have multiple 100-139 GB LUN/Drives formatted NTFS. They are not RDM's.

So I am just trying to figure out if I am missing something since I have never tried to virtualize boxes that have had SAN LUN's as windows formatted drives.

I mean, they need to be on VMFS volumes and be vmdk's so to P2V these servers I would need huge chunks of SAN LUNS presented/masked and then formatted as VMFS volumes that equal what is already on the physical boxes. Not to mention the time it will take to actually convert them but I am just trying to figure out if there is something that is obvious to me and I'm just missing.

[theanykey]

Is your goal simply to convert a windows install which is booting from SAN?

Should be fine. Have you tried it? Does it fail - if so, can you produce the logs?

[francisbandi]

If this is not you system volume - you may run serarate task to capture only the SAN volume with any other volumes.

a 100 GB volume will take atleast 14hrs.

Once it is done (status will show it as failed at 97%) you can attach that disk to you VM (P2Ved for system volumes.

[vmroyale · Accepted solution]

I have Domino running in VMs - it works great. I use RDMs to store the data, mainly so that I can get snaps with the SAN.

Is there a requirement for the use of VMFS volumes? If you are not opposed to using RDMs, just use Converter to get the OS and application volumes over. Then do the zoning/presentation of the NTFS LUNs back to the converted VM where they can be attached as RDMs.

This approach would allow you to just use whatever VMFS storage is required to do the conversion of the system and data volumes, and the heavy storage could just remain as it is.

[ktwebb68]

We're just moving the physical boxes up there. SAN group doesn't do RDM's and using converter may be a long term option but this has to be done basically on a long weekend. Thanks for everyone's suggestions.