Storage VMotion

[ikirkum]

According to one of features of Storage VMotion can be used in Migration approach of VI.2.5 to VI.3.5 . But there is no relevant documents how this can be achieved ?

Let me explain our scenario : we have 10 ESX box on ESX -2.5.1 with IBM fast Storage running 70 Production Virtual machines. We want to migrate these production virtual machines to our new ESX server 3.5 box connected with Storage CX380 and decommission the 10 ESX hosts. Can we do these approach through storage VMotion ? any architecture reference?

[ctfoster]

A good start would be to see if your system mets the basic requirements for Storage VMotion.

- Virtual machine disks must be in persistent mode or be raw device maps.

- The host on which the virtual machine is running must have sufficient resources to support two instances of the virtual machine running concurrently for a brief time.

- The host on which the virtual machine is running must have a VMotion license, and be correctly configured for VMotion.

- The host on which the virtual machine is running must have access to both the source and target datastores.

VMware Infrastructure 3 supports a maximum of four simultaneous VMotion or Storage VMotion accesses to a single datastore. A migration with VMotion

involves two simultaneous accesses to the datastore, by the source and destination hosts. A migration with Storage VMotion involves one access to the source

datastore and one access to the destination datastore. Therefore, if no other migrations are occurring, up to four concurrent Storage VMotion migrations involving the datastore can occur simultaneously.

[LarsLiljeroth]

We did the same as you are describing with the " Migration upgrade method.

As you describe you have two running environments and you "just" need to migrate the server to the new environment. That is running the new version.

This process can be done by doing a vmotion of the server from environment A -> environment B the only backside is that you cant go back and you have no backup of

the server on the old ESX Server.

So we used Vmigrator from Vizioncore. witch will leave a copy on the source and also handles the Vmware tools installation on the destination .... And it works perfect.

There is a very good document describing different upgrade paths here ( Se page 21 for migration upgrade ... -> http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_35/esx_3/r35/vi3_35_25_upgrade_guide.pdf

Just saw that you need at least version 2.5.3 to support the Migration upgrade.... But it works anyway if you use the Vmigrator.

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[ikirkum]

Thanks for the reply, I did seen the pre-requiste in the document and meet all the requirements you have mentioned .

1)Do i need to present the IBM Fast Storage ( VMFS 2) to the new ESX 3.5 Server/?

2)Power off each VM and use svmotion command to new storage ?

3) I understand VMFS 2 will be read mode when connected to ESX 3.5..is this correct ?

[dominic7]

Gopu,

There are a couple reasons that you're having trouble finding information about this process.

1. The 'Storage VMotion' from ESX 2.5.x -> 3.X was originally named DMotion

2. It was poorly documented to begin with.

Here is a rough idea of how it works ( and it does work, I've done this a number of times ).

1. Set up VMotion ( networking/cpu compatibility, etc) between your 2.5.x hosts and the new 3.x hosts

2. Present the 2.5.x LUNs to the 3.5 hosts and scan the storage. The LUNS will be read-only on the 3.x hosts.

3. Right click on the esx 2.5.x VM and 'Migrate' and select a new host ( esx 3.5 ) and datastore ( vmfs on the new storage )

The migration process takes a while, but the VMs are up and running while you migrate. Once the process completes it will automatically delete the VM from the VMFS 2 volume.

4. At some point you will need to power down the VM and upgrade the virtual hardware ( right click->upgrade virtual hardware, takes like 5 seconds ) and optionally install new VMware tools.