vSAN Mesh and Temporary Storage

[Tibmeister]

So got vSAN 7.0 U3(d) and have a question about the HCI MESH.  I have a single-host cluster (not my choice) that uses local storage on the ESXi host itself (again, not by choice).  I need to do some hardware rework on the single-host cluster and was planning on moving the two VMs over to my larger vSAN cluster. 

Originally, was just planning to do a Storage vMotion, since there's a shared vMotion and Management network plane, but was pondering maybe mounting the vSAN datastore to this cluster that the single-host is in, moving the storage, then the compute so that I can isolate the host.  My question is, since I already have a datastore (local), will this cause a conflict, and is there any issues with moving the VM back to the local datastore after the work is done (again, not by my choice) and unmounting the remote vSAN datastore?

[basteku73]

If you have the option to do storage vmotion, I wouldn't complicate it, I would do it this way, without any additional reconfiguration. The simpler the setup, the less problems

Regards, 

Sebastian

[depping · Accepted solution]

No issue at all @Tibmeister . That is what we have some customers exactly using HCI Mesh for. But as you also will need to migrate the VM from a storage point of view, you may as well just use SvMotion and not use HCI Mesh if you are not planning to keep the VM the vSAN Datastore.

[paylkhan]

Hello has your storage issue solved.

[Tibmeister]

One thing I didn't mention is the EVC mode of the clusters is not compatible, so I have to shut down the VM to move to the other cluster and vice versa.  Mounting the vSAN datastore to the "source" cluster lets me to do the long process of the Storage vMotion while the VM stays live, minimizing the downtime.

The original plan was to power down the VM and do the Storage vMotion, taking however long it takes.  The only hesitation I have is this is the SolarWinds monitoring solution for my environment, so downtime is not something I want for this thing.  by far not what I would've recommended for the setup, but it's what I got.