Merging / Combining multiple VMDK's on different datastores into one VMDK on yet another Datastore.

[JordenKleier]

So, I think I know the answer to this (do it the long way) but i wanted to run it by the community just in case I was wrong.

The Environment:

vSphere 5 Enterprise

ESXi 5.1.0.

vm: Windows serer 2008 standard (not R2).

upgrading to a 2012R2 server.

Originally, there were never any LUNs/datastores made over 500GB because of the old-school cluster sizing before VMFS5.

Basically, we had a 225GB drive on a Windows file server. More space was needed, so rather than increasing the size of the virtual disk, and expanding it in windows, they added another 225GB disk to the vm, from a different datastore, and spanned the disks in Windows.  This was performed again later, so this vm currently has three separate 225GB disks (four if you count the system disk) on three separate datastores, that the OS sees as a single 675GB drive.

What I would LIKE to do is simply merge those three vmdk's via magic into a single VMDK, then just mount that VMDK onto the new server. I've read some documentation and some posts here and there regarding merging split vmdks into monolithic ones, but that's still VMware presenting the OS with a single disk that happens to be broken up into pieces, and not VMware presenting the OS with multiple disks that the OS itself combines into one piece.

I'm 90% sure that this is just a pipe dream, but it (usually) never hurts to ask if anyone has run across a similar experience.

Thanks!

[continuum]

I would also prefer to get rid of any setups that use spanned volumes like this.
I would power of the VM, add a new 700gb or larger vmdk and thenboot into a Windows-based LiveCD.and clone spanned disk to the new larger one.
It may need some research when selecting a tool to use for the task.
To get the data across robocopy would do - but then you have to use something to make the vmdk bootable.

[dsralston2]

A couple different ways depending on if boot drive is primary.

1.     If not, just create a new disk the size you want and then use windows software mirroring to mirror the data and permissions over.

2.  If so, you have to use something like DD or Ghost to do it -- but you will have to boot into a different OS and mount the drives in that.

Pretty straight forward!