Migrating drives to a new host controller card and re-attaching the datastores?

[GawainXX]

Greetings,

I've noticed that datastores seem to not like to have their host controller changed. I tried to move one of my drives from the raid controller to my onboard storage controller but VMware lost the link to the datastore and would only let me wipe and reprovision the drive via the UI.

My current raid controller has a drive capacity limit of 2TB and I'm suspect of whether it's beginning to fail or not as I've had an issue with occasional high latency via it.

I plan on dropping in a PCI-E Sata or SAS controller card and moving anything currently on the raid controller onto that.

I would like to migrate the data stores over, is there a simple method for re linking them without having to wipe and rebuild?

Running VSphere 6.7u3 (Free License)

[vMarkusK1985]

The best option might be Backup and Restore (with a free license only Export and Re-Import possible).

Migrating an existing RAID-Set to a new Controller-Type might not work.

[a_p_]

If the disks/volumes are properly detected by the new controller, the VMFS volumes will likely be recognizes as "Snapshot LUNs", i.e. volumes with already known signatures, but from a different location.

In this case you may want to check whether the VMFS datastore can be mounted from the CLI. For details see the "Command line" section in https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1011387 for the ESXi version that you are using.

André