ESXi Running Out of Storage, How to Migrate?

[Juan_Carnage_II]

Hello,

I have a single physical server running ESXi 2x2.0GHz Quad Core CPUs.  We have a single RAID 5 array 3x250GB, and I need to add more storage, however I can't add to my existing array because of controller limitations.  I have 3x2TB drives that I would like to use.  Does anyone have a suggestion as to how I would accomplish moving my ESXi platform over to a new 3x2TB array?  I'm trying to do an in place migration essentially and I'd like to avoid reinstalling ESXi and migrating my VM's as that would take quite sometime.

Thanks in advance.

[jac777]

How many VMs are running on that ESX host? Do you have plan to add one more ESX host?

[QFactor57]

Ran into this myself. You will need to attach the new storage array to your ESX server and then use the Storage vMotion feature to move the files. Hopfully you have enough room in your server to add the storage adapters. What kind do you have? (SAS, SCSI, iSCSI.etc)

[mark24]

Before getting into too deep have you looked at the VI Plug-in SVMotion tool:  http://sourceforge.net/projects/vip-svmotion/

From your description, this tool may be a possible solution.

[iLikeMoney · Accepted solution]

I'm sure someone will have a better way but I would expect this is going to take awhile no matter what anyone says.  Assuming ESXi itself is not installed on the same array, my thought would be to:

1) get hold of a 1TB external hard drive, these can be had for $80-$100 on newegg, plug it into a PC on your network and create share on it

2) map to this share on the PC where your vsphere client is installed

3) shutdown all of your VMs and start exporting each as an OVF to the share

4) following the exports you will probably want to remove the VMs from your inventory

5) after that you may also want to remove your datastores

6) also at some point you'll have to put the host into maint mode, shutdown the host

7) remove your old drives and your old raid card, set them aside for now, if things go bad then worse-case scenario I suppose you still have everything intact

😎 install your new raid card and new drives

9) create your new array

10) boot up the host and take it out of maint mode

11) should now be able to create a new (larger) datastore on the array

12) import your OVFs from the share back over to the new datastore

[Dave_Mishchenko]

As stated already the migration process will involve some sort of copy process.  I don't recall anyone using clone tools to copy one VMFS datastore to another array.  If you have ESXi installed onto the existing array, then I would start with a new install on the new array.  Boot the new ESXi install and you'll be able to access the existing datastore (and you can easy add the existing VMs to inventory on the new ESXi install). There are lots of tools and scripts to clone a VM.  One option would be to install an eval of vCenter and use it to clone the VMs from datastore to datastore.  Keep in mind that ESXi has a 2 TB LUN limit (actually 2 TB - 512 B)  so you'll have to carve up your storage appropriately.

[aaronhDMI]

You could add a storage server using iSCSI or NFS to add storage and then you wouldn't have to move your VMs. Openfiler and FreeNAS will handle both with a gui. The nice thing about NFS is more then one ESXi host can attach and use the storage.