moving to a new storage array problem

[BorisBorshevsky]

Hello,

In these days my company is migrating from the old Hitachi 9980v storage array to the Hitachi USP-V since the 9980V in not licensed anymore and going to be thrown off at the end of this month.

We have more than 200 ESX4 U1 on 3 different sites most of them are booted over san. (Only 2 sites are migrated, the third one working on AMS2300)

Problem #1:

migrating the BOS lun, I’ve tried several ways to move this lun to the new platform - via storage appliances - and every time the lun signature of the OS lun changed and the server stuck at vmsd driver since ut didn't recognize the lun (of course it will happen since the luns are signed with the array serial =\!! )

I’ve fixed this via manual resignature, but this process is very time consuming for so many ESXs

Other solution was to reinstall the ESX, time consuming as well for so many servers

Any other ideas?

Note: enable resignature didn’t help

Problem #2:

We have few VMs with RDMs in physical mode on both sites; we use RDM to be able to do True Copy between sites

All the VMs have been moved via storage vmotion except the RDM owners.

I’m afraid that using UVM (Hitachi feature - enables sort of shadow imaging between array) will change the signature again and i won’t be able to work with the luns properly.

Haven’t had time to test this yet, are there any best practices for this, or did anyone done this?

Message was edited by: BorisBorshevs…

[BorisBorshevsky]

Problem #1 solved, going to reinsall the Hosts; than run a script to reconfigure them,

any ideas how to move a RDM to the new SAN (keeping him as RDM)?

[BorisBorshevsky]

bump

[HughBorg707]

Greets,

I don't have a definative answer for you, but I did come across this link on vSphere and RDMs (physical and virtual)

http://blog.scottlowe.org/2010/08/18/storage-vmotion-with-rdms/

Ultimately though it may require a special tool from your SAN vendor to make it happen.

Hope this helps.

Hugh

http://www.1zero1.net

[BorisBorshevsky]

Thanks, I've seen this article googling for a solution.

anyway, we have all the tools of the storage side needed; the thing is I’m afraid of the ESX behavior for when I move the lun to the new Storage since the lun Signature works with the storage device serial

At this moment I still don't have enough time to test it

Just hoping that Enabling Resignature will work

[depping]

What type of resignaturing do you mean? If you are talking about the VMware storage resignaturing it will not help. However as long as you know which RDMs belong to which VM you could just re-add them after the migration. Shouldn't be too difficult

Duncan (VCDX)

Available now on Amazon: vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS technical deepdive

[BorisBorshevsky]

After testing

the storage signature did change,

but I was able simply to re-add the RDM to the virtual machine and it worked perfectly

thanks

[depping]

thanks for the feedback.

Duncan (VCDX)

Available now on Amazon: vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS technical deepdive