Detaching iSCSI from ESXi

[HammTP]

Hello,

Situation is like this.

We have two servers. Server A and server B. On server A we have installed ESXi. Every single server (A and B) have some number of HDD space that is „melted“ in one big HDD. On that „big“ HDD we have several OS running.

Time has come to put server B out of function, by doing that we have to detach iSCSI. (and we don't want to user iSCSI any more)

By doing that there is a serious problem that OS that are currently running on ESXi will not run again because I cannot know on witch disk data was written.

Example: Windows 2003..half was written on server A and other half on server B…

My question is: Is there any document/procedure…or something like that in witch I can se how to detach iSCSI from ESXi.

The best situation would be if ESXi see that server B is shutting down and then he start to transfer all important files to the server A.

Server A and B has no RAID fields and ESXIi version is 3.5.

Best regards

[Jackobli]

This is quite confusing.

How did you "melt" that disks? Sounds like a RAID0, but I do not know any RAID0 built out of two harddisks on seperate computers. Is there any third party software running?

[HammTP]

Yes...it is quite confusing...I’ am sorry

There is no RAID fields... Let's say that disks from two servers was combined in one datacenter (place where we install all virtual machines). So if you have 1TB disk in server A and 500GB disk in server B combined together in one datastore you gain space of 1,5TB of HDD space.

Ok and now I want to remove server B (If I move server B I also move 500gb HDD)..so...if some part of virtual machine was written on that 500gb HDD I will potentially cause destruction of virtual machines that was on that other 500gb HDD.

Best regards

[depping]

You might actually want to also tell us what kind of iSCSI SAN you are using. are you using local diskspace to create an iSCSI LUN? Or are we talking about an iSCSI array with two LUNs combined into 1 Datastore?

Duncan

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[HammTP]

We are using remote iSCSI configured on Debian. We are using combination of local disks and iSCSI LUNs into single datastore.

First we have configured just local disks for datastore, and after that we attached iSCSI LUN in to that datastore, due of lack of space.

Since we did not add any new machine in to that datastore, can you please tell us is it possible that some data were moved to that iSCSI LUN, if it is, can you please provide us information how to restore it on local disks.

Thank you.

Kind regards

HammTP

[Jackobli]

You used the function "Add extent..." to grow your local datastore with an iSCSI LUN?

Yikes...

I'd add another datastore (perhaps on a NFS filesystem) and "move" all the guests to it.

Then destroy the old datastore.

[HammTP]

Yes, we did that. We also get to same conclusion as well

p.s moderator..you can lock this thread

Best regards

HammTP