Migration of mulitple VM's to different datacenter.

[MikeS1983]

Hi All,

Here is the scenario:

We are moving datacenters and we need to migrate multiple VM's which vary in size from 10Gb upto over 3Tb over multiple datastores.

The solution we are trying to test is using lun replication over iSCSI and register the VM's on hosts on the new datacenter.

Before we can attempt to copy the luns I have the following questions:

1) All VM's will be shut down and during lun copy. Do I need to remove the datastore from VMware?

2) If I do then how do I remove the datastore whilst preserving the data? Does the delete datastore preserve the data?

Thanks in advance

Mike.

[dburgess · Accepted solution]

Are you copying the entire LUN/Datastore and the new datastore is connected to different ESX servers? If so having the VM's down is sufficient. The LUN at the destination will need to be re-signatured of course as they will appear to the remote ESX servers as clones. If you have not done this before make sure you understand the process, essentially the remote ESX won't mount the new volumes as it takes a cautious view of what might be a replica of a pre-existing LUN i.e the case where the datastore is moved but the ESX servers are shared across sites. If you are just copying the VM's LUNS (VMDK files) this wont be a problem/issue.

dB

[athlon_crazy]

1) As deburgess mentioned, it's sufficient to power down the VMs and no need to remove the datastore. LUN resignature should allow you to mount your copied LUN to ESX hosts on the other site.

2) datastore remove will also delete all the VMFS datastore except for datastore over NFS.

vcbMC-1.0.6 Beta

vcbMC-1.0.7 Lite

[MikeS1983]

Thank you for your answers.

I have tested this and I am happy to go ahead with the migration.

Thanks again

Mike.