Storage Migration of 8 TB disk

[zenivox]

Hello, is there anybody who has migrated very large disks from one storage unit to another? I have a VM with a secondary vmdk lazythick disk and I need to move this disk from a 3par storage unit to a different datastore on another 3par unit. The size of the disk is 8 TB. The bigger disk I moved so far is 2 TB and it took 2.5 hrs without issues. ESXi 6.5 U3 has 2600 Series 16Gb Fibre Channel to PCI Express HBAs. I'm afraid to do it simply because I never moved such a large disk before.

Also, I cannot shut down the VM, no chance.

[Arvind_Kumar11]

Hello Mate,

I had a same issue few month ago, in which I had to move a VM of about 10TB.

Once I initiated the storage vmotion, it showed some behavior but didn't start in actual. I was not having any datastore which is more than 10TB rather I had 5x5TB datastores to move VM files.

Either you can move the VM to a datastore which have free space greater than your VM size, or simply shut the machine off and move the HDDs one by one.

[zenivox]

Thanks! The VM is not 8 TB, it's just one of its disk that is 8TB. I will move only that disk onto a datastore of 10 TB in size. What is the biggest disk you moved successfully?

[a_p_ · Accepted solution]

There's basically no need to worry with storage migration. The original virtual disk will only be removed after a successful migration to the new storage/LUN. Just make sure that there's no task that tries to take a VM snapshot (e.g. VM based backup) during the migration.

André

[zenivox]

many thanks a_p_ appreciated! Will give it a try during the night.. or weekends!