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P2Ver
Contributor
Contributor

Will it work? 1 ESX host, 2 different SAN's

Hi there!

I'm finally moving my whole virtual environment from an old MSA1000 SAN to a fresh new Compellent SAN!

But there are several ways to migrate from one SAN to another.

I wanted to skip the Vmware Converter method, since that will cause downtime for a few over our servers, and ofcourse.. sysadmins dont wanna work late... we have a life after virtualization;-)

So my next idea was to use the 1TB local storage on one of our ESX hosts, Svmotion the most of our vm's to the local storage, disconnect the HBA's from the MSA SAN, connect them to the Compellent and Svmotion the vm's from local storage to the Compellent storage.

And than I'll use this ESX host for the migration from one SAN to the other just as long as all the vm's are moved out of the MSA SAN.

So, this might work, as long as the ESX host (which is running all the time during the migration) won't nagg by all of the storage changes.

But it takes a lot of time...

My final option is, to connect 1 HBA port to the Compellent, and 1 HBA port to the MSA, both on 1 and the same ESX host.

My question; will this work? Or do I get in trouble somewhere? switchdomains?

I hope to hear from you all:)

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weinstein5
Immortal
Immortal

Yes an ESX host can communicate to two different SANs at the same time - the only down side is during the moves you will not have redundant paths to your SANs -

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P2Ver
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks, I guess it's a risk to take...

I'll let you know wether it worked out right later on this week! Smiley Happy

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Ande11
Contributor
Contributor

We recently moved from an HP EVA to Compellent by the same method.  We were moving from old technology to 4Gbps HBA and SAN throughput so we were able to just install the new HBAs in our hosts and then do the migrations.  That way we didn't lose the redundancy.  Much easier than moving the machines to local storage and then back to SAN storage.