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jheideman
Contributor
Contributor

P2V MSCS with no downtime?

Currently we have 2 older HP DL360's that run our file and print sharing. We

have them setup in a cluster. Since both boxes are about out of maintenance we

are wanting to VM them, but without any down time if all possible. Currently

there is only 1 shared drive (has data + quorum information).

I guess I just need to know if this is possible and maybe I'm missing

something or if we're going to have to bite the bullet and schedule some down

time to do this.

We took one of our physical boxes and evicted it from the cluster.

Then we setup a VM, added it to the network, setup the IP's (heartbeat &

network), etc. I had the person running our SAN present the current LUN to the

ESXi host that will house this VM. After shutting off the VM I went to add the

new drive.

  • Raw Device Mappings

  • Selected the newly added LUN

  • Store with Virtual Machine

  • Physical

  • SCSI (1:0)

Then I changed the SCSI controller to Physical. After I click OK it goes to

configure my changes, and then I get the following error message "Invalid

configuration for device '0'".

Now one thing I notice is when looking at the storage adapters after the LUN

has been presented it shows as "0.00 B" which I'm curious if this is

because we still have 1 of the nodes currently connected to this space on the SAN? If that

is the cause of all this does this mean there is no way to bring the 2nd node

back up in the VM without first turning off the cluster completely?

Thanks for any advice

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msemon1
Expert
Expert

Look carefully at some of the posts regrading P2V'ing MSCS

Microsoft shared disk clusters are difficult to P2V. This is primarily because of its dependency on shared SCSI buses and the disk signatures that they use to identify the shared disks. The disk signatures are stored in the master boot record (MBR) of the physical disk. The cluster service stores the MBR of all the disks that it manages and track.

When a cluster is P2v-ed, these disk signatures are lost and therefore the cluster service cannot find a disk that is identified by a particular signature, it will fail to bring the disk online.

http://reconsider-this.blogspot.com/2008/10/p2v-of-shared-disk-aka-scc-clusters.html

Mike

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jheideman
Contributor
Contributor

So if i'm reading the document you posted correctly there is no way to do this with the current LUN? The way I'm reading this is that we have to create a 2nd LUN of the same size and present the it to the host boxes instead of the original LUN for it to replicate the information during the P2V process.

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msemon1
Expert
Expert

Take a look on pg 35 on the setup for Microsoft cluster service document on using physical to virtual clustering and I think you will find your answer.

www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_35/esx_3/vi3_35_25_u1_mscs.pdf