Best Practices for Moving Guests from Local Storage to SAN

[dlchapman]

Our company has finally implemented a storage area network to take advantage of vMotion and HA. Does anyone have suggestions on how to move 15 guest VMs with a total of 4TB over to the SAN with minimal effort and downtime? From how I see it I have the following three options but would definitely like some input:

1) Power off each guest, manually move their .vmdk files to the new datastore; update settings (not really a viable option)

2) Use the vCenter Converter to move them to a new datastore

3) Use the vCenter Migrate option to move each to a new datastore. I'm not sure I can use this option since vMotion is not yet on.

[Troy_Clavell]

Our company has finally implemented a storage area network to take advantage of vMotion and HA. Does anyone have suggestions on how to move 15 guest VMs with a total of 4TB over to the SAN with minimal effort and downtime? From how I see it I have the following three options but would definitely like some input:

1) Power off each guest, manually move their .vmdk files to the new datastore; update settings (not really a viable option)

no, not really a good option

2) Use the vCenter Converter to move them to a new datastore

a safe and effective way to do this, plus very reliable

3) Use the vCenter Migrate option to move each to a new datastore. I'm not sure I can use this option since vMotion is not yet on.

If you don't have vmotion, then you can shutdown the VM and do a cold migration off local disk to SAN disk.

Option 2 or 3 would be my choice. And if you afford the downtime, go with option 3

[vmroyale]

Hello.

Without SVMotion, option 3 looks the best/safest. You can migrate powered off VMs with no problems.

Good Luck!

[dlchapman]

I'm sorry, I should have clarified...

I do have storage vMotion licensed but it's not enabled at the moment. With svMotion, will I be able to use the migrate option without incurring any downtime?

[vmroyale · Accepted solution]

Yes - if you can wait for SVMotion, then that would be the ideal solution. No downtime required!

[JroscoPHD]

I'm assuming this is vSphere and not ESX3.

Is the SAN attached? What type of SAN? Fiber Channel or ISCSI/NFS?

If FC - you have to add shut down the host and add FC cards and Zone on to the fabric Then you can Storage Motion.

If ISCSI/NFS you should be able to add the new shared VMFS volumes and migrate.

Rosco

www.PHDVirtual.com makers of esXpress

[JroscoPHD]

If still ESX3 you can try this tool as sVmotion was not added to the UI.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/vip-svmotion/

Rosco

www.PHDVirtual.com makers of esXpress

[dlchapman]

iSCSI. Yes, I've been migrating the guests to their new datastores already. I only have 5 left to do. Thanks for the help.

[gyanguru]

Hi There,

I am in the same boat as you were and would appreciate if you advice which method you finally used to migrate your VM's to SAN.

Thanks much!