Moving vCenter Server From Local Storage to SAN

[btobia]

I currently have vCenter server running on ESX inside of a VM. I realized today that it's on local storage instead of SAN storage, which means I'm in trouble if that host ever goes down. Has anyone moved VC from local stroage to SAN before? What's the best way of doing this? I want to keep it on the same host, just want to relocate the storage. Any suggestions would be appreciated!

Thanks!

[Troy_Clavell]

if you are running vCenter 2.5 and ESX 3.5 you can use sVMotion

http://www.virtualizationadmin.com/articles-tutorials/vmware-esx-articles/vmotion-drs-high-availabil...

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

[btobia]

Thank you for the quick response Troy! Unfortunately I only have standard licenses currently, so I don't have sVMotion capability Are there any alternative methods?

I forgot to mention, this is VC 2.5u3 on ESX 3.5u3

[Troy_Clavell · Accepted solution]

Well, is your DB running on the same VM? See cloning is a feature of vCenter, but if you shutdown your vCenter VM, you lose the clone capability. You can probably copy the files using something like WinSCP, but you would have to power down your vCenter instance, making a note of what Hosts its running on. Remove the vCenter VM from local inventory, don't delete it yet. Take the new files you copied over to shared storage, browse and right click on the .vmx and add to inventory, then follow the prompts. Once your instance comes back on-line you can delete the files off local storage.

Another suggestion would be if you DB is separate, build a new instance and point it to your existing DB

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/5850444

[btobia]

I have the DB on one of my SQL 2005 boxes, but I think I would feel better just moving the VM storage like you indicated. I'll have to schedule some downtime and do it that way. Thank you for your help, it's much appreciated! This is further evidence to upgrade our licesnes to ent.