SAN Maintenance

[VM_MEG]

Here's my scenario. Currently running vSphere 5 ina HA/DRS cluster on two hosts. We have an upcoming SAN maintenance where, of course, there can be no IO to the SAN. My problem is this. I have one VM on the cluster that controls VPN and it's imperative that this VM is up and running. So how do I accomplish this? My thought was to vMotion this one VM on to the local storage of one host and then unmount the datastores that reside on the SAN. In my brief reading I'm a little nervous that this will result in not being able to mount them back up after the maintenance. Can someone confirm how this process works? Am I on the right track or should I make other arrangements for this VM?

[marcelo_soares]

You can svmotion this VM to a local datastore from one of your ESX servers. During the maintenance, this VM will be up with no issues.

For the maintenance, I would recommend a shutdown of all VMs that resides on the SAN and the unpresentation of all LUNs that are presented to the ESX servers. You may want also to remove the VMs from inventory, or you will have them greyed out on vcenter. After that, a rescan will remove the datastores from your inventory. Perform you maintenance and restore the SAN and the presentation, and rescan the volumes again. You *should* have averything back again normally. If the maintenance changes the way the LUNs are identified, you may need to ressignature the VMFS volumes.

In this case, obviously, backups are more than welcome

[VM_MEG]

Well, if that is the only to do it then I think I'll have to pass.

So in preperation I am bringing up another ESXi box on a trial license and will just svMotion the necessary systems to it.