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dcoz
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

Test & Dev ESX Host question

Hi all,

We are looking at having an ESX host for test /dev purposes that will have a direct attached storage as well as being zoned into the SAN.

Our thinking behind this was once we want to move the vm from the direct storage to the SAN as it is zoned it it should allow us.

There are a few questions from this solution i would be grateful for your opinion on?

Would there be any issues with ESX seeing the LUNs of the SAN with the direct attched storage already presented? (im think more along the lines of LUN ID's)

Is there any point in zoning it into the SAN. Can vmotion copy the VM's to the SAN?

If you have two drives within the VM and want to split the two during migration to the SAN onto two different target vmfs volumes is there an issue, and should we even bother?

Any feedback on this would be grateful.

Thanks

D

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java_cat33
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

Would there be any issues with ESX seeing the LUNs of the SAN with the direct attched storage already presented? (im think more along the lines of LUN ID's)

Nope - All the builds I do have local storage and SAN. The local vmfs storage is not used however.

Is there any point in zoning it into the SAN. Can vmotion copy the VM's to the SAN?

Yes, you must zone your ESX server. Only have one ESX server per zone - make sure no other servers are in the zone).

In regards to vmotion - no this will not copy the VM's to the SAN. To move a running VM from one datastore to another, you must have ESX 3.5 and Virtual Center 2.5. If you want to migrate your VM, power it off and migrate it (assuming you have Virtual Center).

If you have two drives within the VM and want to split the two during migration to the SAN onto two different target vmfs volumes is there an issue, and should we even bother?

No it's not an issue. Why would you want to split them during the migration?

Draconis
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Java is correct about his response. DAS shows as local storage so moving it to the SAN is not a problem. That can only be done by cold migration unless you will be using VMWare storage vmotion. The SAN should always be zoned since ESX scans through all LUNS available to it during startup. It will scan through all 256 LUNs if you didnt zone properly if you had that many. If you will boot from SAN, ensure the ESX server has its own LUN and not partition since it will lock that whole LUN and data loss is possible. VMotion only registers which ESX server owns the VM and not actually move the vmdk files which hold the data. You should place the Virtual Machine files together so you can easily back them up and ensure that the VMFS3 partition is 64K-aligned. What you can do is when making a VM, give it a set size for the OS and then add additional drives for its data. This will be easier for disaster recovery.

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dcoz
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

Ok so to me clear.

There is no issues having a direct attached array mixed with the SAN, and when moving vm's from direct attached to SAN perform a cold migration.

thanks for the responses.

Regards

D

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