svMotion large RDM

[daunce]

Looking for real world experiences on anyone that has svMotion'ed a large RDM, or vmdk..

I'm planning on doing a 1.4TB RDM (in virt compat mode)

Just curious how long it has taken, and if there were any issues in moving such a large chuck of data. I'm concerned at how long it may take, and how the snapshot will cope being there for that long.

It'll be going to a LUN on the same SAN with the same raid level etc. The SAN is an eva8400. no vaai.

It's a file server, and really ramps up between 7am-6pm, so outside business hours would be the go

What's the longest/biggest svMotion you've done?

Cheers

[EdWilts · Accepted solution]

I just did a 1.5TB non-RDM vmdk a week or two ago.  This was between 2 data centers with 10g connectivity.  It took less than a day (I'm guessing 10-12 hours but I can't remember for sure).  This was on ESXi 4.1U1.  I did this during the day but it was a test system with an active MySQL database on it.

I did a 600+GB non-RDM vmdk between those same datacenters while we were still at ESX 4.0 and it took several days.  Moral of the story is to make sure your ESX installation is current...

[bckirsch]

I have done close to 2TB on a EMC frame...it was the better part of a day but no one notice (yes done during core business hours)

[daunce]

Just thought i'd update this:

I finally did part 1, a 500GB RDM. It took 2 hours. It broke SAN replication to the DR site (over 1Gbps shared link!), but after full copy for that DR group, it was fine.

It was much quicker than expected.

Part 2 - 1.5TB LUN scheduled for next week.

[tetrapackage]

It will always depend on how fast your machines are as well as your Internet connection. The better they are, the faster they can finish extracting such large amount of data.