Physical relocation of all ESX boxes and SANs

[Netcentral]

We've got a rather collosal relocation of our entire ESX platform coming up. All networks will remain the same but we're moving 3 SAN's and 6 heads up to another datacentre. I'm concious that the SAN's are powered down last and powered up first, but I have a question.

We plan to shutdown all VM's before this move. They will all be off. I've got quite a few machines in a HA cluster. Am I right in thinking that these VM's won't be moved by the HA / DRS systems as I'm sticking the head into maintenance mode ready for shutdown? Or should I just disable HA totally before we do this, then re-enable after relocation?

I'd love any hints and tips from others that have done this. I'm lucky enough to have a SAN and one "head" to do a dry-run on, but it's a collosal move that we're planning with pinpoint accuracy. The last thing I need is ESX 3.5 seeing a bunch of LUNs that it doesn't "trust" and trying to format the content on them, so I'm ensuring that the SAN's are on first and responding before bringing the heads back.

Any advice or thoughts are greatly appreciated.

[Gerrit_Lehr]

Power off the VMs manually first. Otherwise going into maintenance mode will migrate the VMs to other systems. When all the VMs are powered off, there is no need to disable HA and DRS and you can power off the ESXs. You might want to have a look at the automatic startup options so after the move you can power up the SANs, power up the ESXs, make sure everything looks fine (SAN is ready, networks are ready etc.) and then power up the VMs.

Kind regards,

Gerrit Lehr

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