Adding Local HOST Storage - Moving VMS's to local Host Storage

[JDTumeq]

Question for Everyone, as I am unfamiliar with the proper procedure for this action.

We have 2 identical HP Servers, running in an HA Cluster as seen below:

Hypervisor:  VMware ESXi, 6.5.0, 8935087

Model:  HP ProLiant DL380 Gen9

Processor Type:  Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2620 v4 @ 2.10GHz

Logical Processors:  32

Virtual Machines:  15

VMWARE is running on two SSD SATA, 480gb mirrored drives on each server. (pic attached) The 'SAN' setup is a Synology Cluster, running on two RS18017xs+, Active - Passive boxes.

We have exceeded our space on the SAN, 11 TB.  That has a 10 GB connection to the hosts, and holds VM machine files and data.

The HP Host servers have 6 available slots each.  I have purchased 12 HPE Read Intensive - solid state drives - 3.8 TB - SATA 6Gb/s

The Raid Controllers on the servers can create an additional logical drive.  My plan was to add the 6 3.8 TB drives to each server, RAID 5.  That would give us roughly 19 TB of local host storage.

Would the proper procedure be to:

1.  Down all vms' on the host, place both host in Maintenance mode, shutdown, add the new storage, boot into the Array Controller setup, add the storage, then boot into VMWARE, take out of maintenance mode and add the new available local storage to each host.  Configured the exact same on each host for fail over.

2.  Leaving vm's powered off, migrate the storage of each vm's to the new local host storage.

The external 11 TB storage would then be recommissioned as a target for additional storage where needed.

As I said, I am not familiar, and I will be messing with 11 TB of data, and 15 servers. 

Any input is appreciated.

[a_p_]

I assume that you are aware of the fact that you will lose High-Availability with the VM's stored on local storage!?

Anyway, the steps sound ok, although I'd probably prefer a RAID6 without Hot-Spare over RAID5 with Hot-Spare with high capacity drives. However, it depends on the workload/requirements.

If you have vSphere Essentials Plus, or better in place, there's not necessarily a need for VM downtime. You can use vMotion, and add the new storage to the hosts one after the other. Once done use Storage vMotion (Option "Change both, host and storage" in Essentials Plus) to migrate the VMs to the new datastores.

André