question on the best practice of sharing Luns in between seperate VI3 farms

[Jusin_Kase]

Hi all

I have a few questions to asks, I am more interested in what are the best practices than what are the quick fixes to make this work.

premise: old farm VI3 (4 x dl585 g1 64go ram 4 double core cpu)

new Farm VI3 (4 x dl585 g3 64Go ram 4 double core cpu)

Question 1) If both farms are zoned to see the same LUNS on the SAN(CX700 and CX3), and I wanted to migrate from one farm to another, would the fact that since both boxes see the same luns, I would only have to transfer (or Migrate) the vmdk file, and once transferred I would have to ensure that the scsii adresses are correct. To make this a successful transfer. Would I have to move the Lun in question since it is seen by both source and target vmdk.

(question 2) Since I already have a farm composed of 4 x dl585 g1 and I want to add 4 to 6 more servers these being dl585 g3, could I out them in the farm, seperate farms, what are the best practice from VMware on this subjects.

thank in advance

J

[oreeh · Accepted solution]

q1: You only have to migrate the VMs.

It's is sufficient that only the new farm sees the old and the new LUNs.

q2: I suggest setting up a new farm since the different CPUs in the ESX boxes would prevent vMotion and the like.

If you really want one big farm you need to create the proper CPU masks.

[masaki]

When you say farms you mean VI3 farms?

If so farms are in the same datacenter and (if same vmfs3 version) you have only to migrate virtual machines with vmotion or dmotion as you like and prefer.

If you are talking about separate networks you can transfer data via scp.

Please give us more details

[Jusin_Kase]

to answer more fully:

I have two locations tied toghether by 7gb links. Presently I have one farm that has 2 esx boxes(dl585g1) at each locations. Each location has its own SAN, presently no SAN-to-SAN replication tools. Presently I am running out of resources and need to add more capacity.

The DL585 G3 (whats on sale now), from what I understand cannot co-exists in the same farm (for Vmotions). So one of my proposals was to build a seperate farm using with 2 or 3 DL585G3 per location.

The new farm would zoned on each location to see the same luns as the first farm.

In this case, if the both farms see the same luns, I would have to migrate the vmdk from one farm to another to transfer the instance, but the attributed luns of the vmdk in question will remain in the same location.

Is this feasible

ty

J

Message was edited by:

Jusin_Kase

[MR-T]

If I'm following youre question correctly, the answer is:

You can cold migrate the virtual machines between the different farms if they both have visability of the LUNS.

You can also select to move the virtual machines onto different LUNS using this method if you wanted to hold the vm's on LUNS which were only accessable by the new DL585G3 servers (example).

[Jusin_Kase]

Hi

We are debating all the comments made here, and we have a question for you. What do you think would the greater good, having one big farm (with half the hardware dl585 g1 and the other half dl585g3)or 2 smaller farms(that are 100% hardware compatible)? And why would you say so.

Do you think Vmotion would work, and if not would this be the biggest drawback?

Also, I wonder if VMware likes the idea of exact same hardware in the same farm for futher considerations.

thank you all for your time.

J

[oreeh]

Two smaller farms because vMotion/DRS/HA works without manipulating the CPU masks.

An ESX cluster without vMotion? Then you could simply split the cluster into standalone machines.

Also, I wonder if VMware likes the idea of exact same hardware in the same farm for futher considerations.

VMware likes it and YOU as the admin will like it too :smileygrin:

[masaki]

Damn, beated on time