ESXi 5.1 - Move local datastore disks to new hardware

[bekatro]

Hi,

I have a customer who had ESXi 5.1 on an old HP Proliant DL380 G6 hardware. Thsi server had 4 local disks, 2 for a Raid1 for ESXi boot, 2 for a Raid1 local datastore fro VMs.

On this the mainboard crashed recently. Since there is no support anymore on this server, is there any chance to get the VMs on the second Raid1 back? Can one of these disks put in a newer Gen8 server and will they be recognized and the old datastore be mounted?

Any help is appriciated.

Thanks

[RyanH84]

In essence, what you are trying to do is read the data from a hardware RAID1 set without the original controller.

You will probably need to plug the disks back into the same model controller (ideally with the same configuraiton) or you could run the risk of damaging the RAID.

Obviously you have two disks which are mirrored. The drives contents will be as a normal disk but you'll have two of them. However, there will probably be some extra metadata or RAID Header at the begining of the drive. This might mean that the data isn't readable by just putting the disk in any old controller.

You could give it a go but I'd be a bit worried. Try and get an exact RAID controller and you should be ok.

[cykVM]

As Ryan stated, you should have identical hardware available. The DL380 G6 has an onboard P410i controller and the Gen8 server would have another controller type. If those 2 disks with the RAID1 datastore are your only "backup" I won't risk destryoing the RAID by connecting it to a different controller.