ESXi

Hi. We need to perform maintenance on one of our storage systems and it needs to be shutdown. We have a 8 host cluster connected to three storage systems, only one of the storage needs to be shutdown. So I cant shutdown all the hosts as other VMs residing on the other storage needs to stay up and running. Also not enough space to move VMs to other storage.

What will be the best way to shutdown the storage. My plan is to shutdown all the VMs running on the affected storage, then shutting down the storage. Datastores and VMs will disconnect and should reconnect once the storage is up and running again?

Any thoughts?

I dont know which version of ESX you are running it, but, it might be a good idea to unmount the vmfs and detach the devices from that storage array. it will prevent any unnecessary APD's which could impact other vmfs volumes

Hi. To unmount the datastores, I will have to remove all the VMs from the inventory and re-add them again when the datastores are back online?

I am running ESXi 5.5 U2. Has APD not been greatly improved in ESXi5? When shutting down the VMs I will stop all IOs to the datastores? So there shouldn't be any IOs to queue will APD still occur?

Hi,

Go through the articles which describes how to gracefully shutdown the storage which are presented to ESXi hosts.

VMware KB: Best practices for VMware ESX or ESXi when scheduling SAN downtime

and VMware KB: Unmounting a LUN or detaching a datastore/storage device from multiple VMware ESXi 5.x/6.0 hosts