Relocation of LUN from one ESX host to another

[scl5451]

Hi, I'm a VI3 newbies. Are there any possibilities to relocate one LUN from one ESX host to another?

I can't seem to find any guide. Please help.

Thanks.

[kri-2]

Hi,

we did this to easily transfer our VMs to a new farm without having a long downtime.

First of all we did a storage vmotion of all vms in the old farm to one lun. Then we shuted down the vms, unregistered them, removed the Lun and added it to the new farm. After that we just needed to reregister the vms using the datastorebrowser.

We had no problems doing that.

Hope this helps!

Chris

[depping]

Welcome to the forums! Are we talking local storage or shared storage? I'm assuming local storage which means both hosts would need to be connected over the network and a cold migration is your best option. A cold migration can be done when the VM is powered off.

Duncan

VMware Communities User Moderator

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[scl5451]

Nop. We are using EMC SAN storage here which connected to few DELL 1955 servers (ESX hosts).

Scenario:

One of the LUN8 currently associated with ESX A and now need to be move to ESX B.

Is it possible? If this is possible, does it mean I need VMotion?

Thank you.

[RobBuxton]

LUNs can be mounted on multiple ESX hosts at the same time.

VMotion uses this feature so the underlying VM isn't moved during VMotion.

[scl5451]

Thanks for the reply. I only have 2 weeks experience with our VI3 infrastructure.

Can you please explain in detail how I can mount the LUN8 to another ESX and unmount from the current ESX host?

I must have the VMotion license to do that?

Thanks a lot.

[RobBuxton · Accepted solution]

You don't need to Unmount the LUN from the first host.

You just need to present the storage to the second ESX Host, not sure how you do that for EMC storage.

If you have Virtual Centre then you just select the Host, go to Configuration and select Storage Adapters and then rescan the HBAs. The presented storage should appear.

If you don't have virtual centre then you should be able to do this from the host.

The main thing to ensure is that you're presenting the LUN with the same ID to all hosts.

If you really needed to remove an unused LUN, verify no VMs are using it, use the Storage Management to UnPresent it and then again rescan the HBAs as above.

[scl5451]

If I present a LUN to multiple host, will it cause any harm?

Because it say not recommended on our EMC SAN, am I taking any risk doing that? Will it cause data loss?

Thank you.