Storage vMotion -- WITH RDMs? - Or will they be ignored for the most part?

[niiick]

Hi all -- I would like to do a storage vMotion, 5 hosts in the cluster -- the five or 6 VMs with RDMs are pinned to specific hosts for DRS sake, but I want to move where the OS drives and VMDK's are from one SAN to another. So the VM has a C:\ drive on the DataStore, all other disks on the VM are via physical RDM. ALL I need to move is the c:\(VMDK) in the storage vmotion process.

Both SANs are connected fine and working to the ESX hosts in the cluster today, all hosts are provisioned to see the RDMs.

My question is, when we go to perform the storage vMotion, How do I avoid if failing? the RDMs are my concern, in the past I think I remember a machine failing to migrate when it had RDMs attached.

any feedback or thoughts would be really helpful.

Nick

[Troy_Clavell]

see

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1005241

[niiick]

I would prefer not to perform a cold storage vmotion, meaning I shut down the VM, disconnect the RDMs and then reconnect them. The document says in the table I can perform the svMotion with physical RDMs, but then below the table is says it's supported with RDMs in virtual mode, but not ONLY in virtual mode?

I have no need to change ESX hosts in this case. Or move the RDM's in any way. Just svMotion of the VMs system disk and in some case another VMDK attacked disk aside from it's many RDMs.

Thanks!

[peetz]

What version of vSphere are you using? At least with 4.1 you can do a Storage VMotion from the VSphere client GUI, and selecting "Advanced mode" here will let you choose what disks to move and what not. Select only the VM's C: drive here, and you don't need to worry about the RDMs.

- Andreas

[niiick]

We are on 4.x and esxi 4.1u2 ..

Okay this helps -- So as far as you know, the pointers would move with the VMDK's and I could decomission the old Datstore? -- I don't want the RDM mappings 'left behind' on the old DataStore.

[peetz · Accepted solution]

You can also move the RDM pointers with the "Change datastore"-wizard. Just be sure to select "Same format as source" for the target disk format. If you choose thin or thick, the RDM will be converted to a VMDK, but with "same format" just the RDM pointer is moved to the new datastore.

- Andreas