Hi everyone,
We are undertaking an upgrade in network infrastructure from 1Gb links to a dedicated 10Gb network for storage. The new network has separate pnics/vswitch/vmkernel, along with a separate VLAN, but it accesses the exact same storage volumes (NFS on Netapp) as the 1Gb links. It appears that when connecting to the same datastore from 2 different vmkernels, vCenter treats them as different, and will not allow vMotion between them. We will need to have both 1Gb and 10Gb storage connections available until the migration is complete in case a vMotion is needed.
Testing with some non-production equipment, it appears that I have 3 options for migrating the VMs:
-Storage vMotion: no downtime, but slow for larger VMs. Destination storage is same as source (just accessed through a different vmkernel), but it appears to work OK.
-Cold migrations: downtime, also slow for larger VMs. If VM is already off, remove/rereg is better solution
-Remove from inventory/re-register VM: downtime, but much quicker than cold migration
While our environment is not huge (about 200VMs over 7 hosts), I would like to do this as efficiently as possible. Has anyone gone through this sort of change before, and is there any other way to do this? We are relatively new to vSphere 4 and have not played too much with PowerCLI, but if there is something there that will make my life easy, I will definitely check it out.
Thanks,
Tim