Storage move - Best practices

[mr387]

I'm working with a team here and performing a data center move soon.  This will be including moving all our ESXi hosts and iSCSI SAN.  Is there a best practice in terms of managing the VMFS datastores during a move like this?  Should we unmount, detach initially and then reattach, and mount once we are at the new location?

I wasn't able to find any guides out there on this.  My end goal is to properly move the storage and prevent any issues with VMFS datastores not functioning properly when we start powering on our ESXi hosts and VMs.  Thanks!

[weinstein5]

Since it sounds like you are doing a forklift move - just power every thing off per procedures pack up and move them - power them back on and  barring any hardware failure in the move they all should come back up -

[mr387]

So I would only need to power down the VMs, put the hosts in maintenance mode, shutdown the hosts, and then simply shutdown the storage (Per best practices)?  Nothing else aside from that?

[f10]

Hi,

Are you going to power off the existing Infra i.e. ESXi hosts, Storage, FC & Network switches and then courier them to a new location? If yes then you can use the below sequence to power off

VMs

ESXi

Storage

FC/Network switch

Once the equipment reaches the destination, ensure that all the cabling and racking is complete and power on the Infrastructure in the following sequence:

FC/Network Switch

Storage

ESXi hosts

VMs

-f10

http://highoncloud.blogspot.in/

About VMware Virtualization on NetApp

[mr387]

Thanks for the reply.  I have that down as the high level plan but I wanted to make sure there wasn't anything I needed to perform on the VMFS datastore/SAN side.  It appears that I just need to shut down the VMs, put the hosts in maintenance mode, shut down the hosts, and shut down the storage, etc. 

[f10]

Yes, that order would take care of all the dependencies between the VMs > ESXi Hosts > Storage LUNs. If there was a requirement to shutdown the storage first then you would have had to unmount the LUNs ahead of the storage shutdown but that is not what you are doing sorry I don't mean to confuse you but just trying to say that this is not so complicated scenario. Hopefully the DC migration will complete without any issues, all the best.

-f10

http://highoncloud.blogspot.in/

About VMware Virtualization on NetApp