Migration of data to new vSphere Datacenter

[Speedbmp]

We are moving from vSphere 5.0 to vSphere 6.7 with vSAN.

we are running two different vCenters

what i would like to do is add our current Tegile SAN to our new vSphere 6.7

i would turn off the VM on our older vSphere 5.0 and remove it from vCenter. then on the new vCenter i would add it. then migrate it over to our vSAN.

i have heard that this is a problem because the data might get corrupted. because the old SAN would be on two different Data centers the LUN would be presented to both old and new ESXi Hosts.

they have said the only way to do this would be to turn off all of the vm's on the old lun, then unmap it to the old ESXi hosts. then map it to the NEW ESXi hosts.

Stephen

[daphnissov]

i have heard that this is a problem because the data might get corrupted. because the old SAN would be on two different Data centers the LUN would be presented to both old and new ESXi Hosts.

they have said the only way to do this would be to turn off all of the vm's on the old lun, then unmap it to the old ESXi hosts. then map it to the NEW ESXi hosts.

Who is "they" in this case? Tegile support? While it's true there are compatibility considerations that you need to take into account, I'm not aware of a case where attaching the same storage array to hosts of two different versions would cause blatant data corruption. This is a commonly-employed tactic when doing swing datastore migrations. But in the case Tegile recommends against that with no viable workaround, there are some other possibilities but may necessitate upgrading your 5.0 environment to something higher. As you're well aware of, 5.0 is quite old and unsupported at this time and so that may not be the preferred course of action.

[Speedbmp]

no not Tegile, i spoke to them and they did a software upgrade on the SAN to make sure it would be compatible with ESXi 6.7.

the person that said this would be the Dell employee that came and setup the new hardware.

i just have never done a Datacenter move like this before. i have moved data from an old SAN to a new SAN in the same datacenter but not to a new datacenter and vCenter.

Stephen

[daphnissov · Accepted solution]

If Tegile says the array is at a sufficiently compatible level to be connected to ESXi 5.0 and ESXi 6.7 hosts, then I'd take their word over someone from Dell. I've done this many times and never had any issues, and certainly not data corruption issues. Diligence is still required when it comes to compatibility, however.

[Speedbmp]

this is one of the reasons why i'm asking. i do have good backups so that's a good thing. i'm waiting on Veeam to support 6.7. i hear that maybe later today as a matter of fact.

Thanks again.

Stephen