Local Datastores

[drewdown]

I have a bladecenter with internal storage, currently 1 blade with ESXi installed runing Raid 1 on 4 disks. I need to migrate/export the images to replace my SAScontrol module with a SAS raid module and in doing so my lose the Raid 1 configuration.

Can I configure 2 more disks as datastores and migrate/move the images to those disks, fire up a new ESXi install on another blade and then add those 2 disks as a datastore on the new blade will it be able to see the images without fail?

TY

[runclear]

no, another node cannot access another nodes "local" storage, - you could however just copy the data off onto your new blades local disk.... checkout fastscp

[drewdown]

Cool. So fire up ESXi on the new blade and just fastSCP (copy) the all the images over? Do i need to copy the entire folders or is there specific files I can move?

[runclear]

Yep,

Then on your new ESX node, browse your datastore, and right click the "vmx" file and "register" the vm on the node, I'd fire up the Vm just to be sure its all good, and you didnt accidently forget a file or something, before you wipe that other blade....

[drewdown]

I am assuming the VMs have to be powered off to do this correct?

Thanks man.

[Dave_Mishchenko]

You might also want to look at VMware Converter (it's a free tool as well).

[runclear]

Like Dave mentions, you can use vmware Converter as we.l, and im "pretty sure" you can do a V2V - hot copy, but keep in mind if any data is written to the vm while its being convereted you might loose some data, so if you can get an outage window, that would be my preference

Unless these are webserver type vm's then just convert away, since they are not being written to, only read....

Just flip the network setting on the "new vm" - i.e. destination copy to "internal" (create a vSwitch with no Nic's and label it "internal' etc...) When its done, flip the network from the Source VM to "Internal" and the Destination VM to "public" etc...

[RParker]

but keep in mind if any data is written to the vm while its being convereted you might loose some data, so if you can get an outage window, that would be my preference

Um.. I thought there was a 'synchronize' function in VM converter 4.0 that would eliminate this.... Isn't this a new feature? I thought I saw this someplace, so after a conversion it will synchronize data that had changed during the conversion....

[runclear]

You might be correct, does the new Converter 4.0? take a snapshot before it starts to migrate/copy the vm? if so that would explain the "sync" as i would assume it simply "commits" the snapshot...

Cool new feature,

[drewdown]

I will tool around with VMConverter to see what I am able to do.

Currently if I can copy the images to a non-raided blade in the same chasis, bring them online, upgrade the SAS card to a SAS Raid card, delete the original raid 1 array that my datastore resides on, create a RAID 5 array and move the images back to the original blade I will be happy.

😐

[runclear]

check out page 10..

Hot Cloning with Converter

Standalone 4.0 - Disadvantages

"Applications that constantly

modify files need to be VSS-aware

to allow you to create a consistent

snapshot for cloning."

[runclear · Accepted solution]

Either way you should be good................

Time to mark this puppy as answered..... :smileyplus:

[drewdown]

VmConverter is slow, takes forever to convert a 40GB file, estimating the time for a local (IE disk to disk in the blade chassis) as a 8 hour job.

With FastSCP I got 3.23KB and its crawling to say the least.

Turning out to be a pain to migrate these.

[jbruelasdgo]

what is the speed connection?

the duplex and speed?

[drewdown]

1000Mb, Full Duplex. Local copy in the bladecenter. IE one ESXi installed on one blade copying to another blade with ESXi installed, all disks are located in the 2 DSM's on the chassis. All VM's were powered off during the copy as well and I expected some fast speeds, but didn't get them.