How to Migrate VM Storage with Snapshots

[Gerry_Deutsch]

ESX 3.02 hosts with all the latest patches. Virtual Center V2.0.2. All VM's are Windows 2003 Server. My ESX Cluster has 14 hosts. All hosts see all 12 LUN's. I need to migrate the storage for many of my VM's off of 8 of the LUN's that I am using. I am getting extremely slow performance from my VM's and have traced the problem to be certain LUN's that had their backend disk aggregate extended. The disk aggreagte was NOT extended on teh VMwar ehost. The backend storage engine, NetApp 3050, extended the aggregate and the LUN's in question were carved out of the disk space that was added to the aggregate. The VM's on the other 4 LUN's have acceptable performance. Many of the VM's have snapshots. You cannot migrate a VM's storage to a new LUN if it has snapshots via Virtual Center. I need to be able to move the VM's to new LUN's without losing the snapshots. Has anyone been able to do this?

[sonofploppy]

I was going to advise using VEEAM FastSCP until I re-read your message and you want to move it to a completly different LUN.....could do via backing it up and restore it using VCBMounter and Restore, obviously a lengthy process though........

[Yattong]

hi,

you could remove from inventory.

Use the tar command to tar the whole directory. I think its something like tar -zcf virtualmachine directory

If the new LUN is attached to the esx server which is hosting the vm, then you can simply do a mv command to move the compressed file.

In the /vmfs/volumes/ you will find the LUN you want to move to. Uncompress the file.

And re-add to inventory.

Good Luck

[ejward]

I haven't tried this but, what about Vmware Converter? Doing sort of a V to V. Would Converter bring over the snapshots? If i get a chance to try it I'll post here.

[Gerry_Deutsch]

I have worked with my SAN team and have been able to come up with a solution to migrate my data off of my "bad" LUN's and onto my "good" LUN's without losing the snapshots. I had my SAN guy use Net App's Snap Mirror product to mirror my "bad" LUN's to new LUN's. Then I had the SAN guy remove the LUN's from my ESX cluster, then I rescanned the HBA's so the LUN's were no longer visiable to the ESX hosts, and then had the SAN guy present the new LUN's back to my ESX cluster using the same LUN numbers. I then had to go into Virtual Center and enable the LUN resignature option. Then I removed all of the VM's from the VC inventory, relabeled the LUN to the old label name, and then reimported the VM's and the snapshots came back intact. I was able to succesfully revert or commit the snapshots and all worked out OK.

Thanks for all of the good suggestions.