Moving an RDM?

[cooiman5]

I have an RDM in physical mode mapped to a guest. I need to move the RDM from one san to another san. How can I do that? The guest is RH 5, and the host it's currently sitting on is ESX 3.5 and will be moving to a new host as well ESX 4.0 The hosts are attached via fiber to both sans.

Thanks in advanced

[MHAV]

Can't your SAN do any RemoteCopy stuff for you?

Regards

Michael Haverbeck

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[AndreTheGiant]

If you make a cold clone or a cold migration you will copy (or move) all your vmdk + RDM disk on the new SAN.

But you will loose RDM configuration (it will be converted in a simple vmdk file).

Another way could be remove RDM disk, move the VM, re-add the RDM disk, add a new RDM disk (on the new SAN) and make a file copy inside the VM from old RDM to new RDM.

Andre

[cooiman5]

MHAV - nope. The old san is Netapp and the new san is 3par.

Andre - I read about the method you mentioned but we want to keep the data on the RDM and not store in a vmdk. The file level copy would also probably take too long and I wouldn't have that amount of down time.

[AndreTheGiant]

The file level copy would also probably take too long and I wouldn't have that amount of down time.

In this case add a new RDM disk (from the the new storage) to your VM, and use rsync to do a live copy.

When you move the data and reconnect the RDM disks, with rsync you will copy only the difference from the last run.

Andre

[Joshua_Mally]

Check this KB out

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-Josh

Trying to learn

[cooiman5]

andre - I suppose I could do that but I was hoping for a more simple/easier approach.

Josh - I can't find an article to describe how to actually use storage vmotion. It also doesn't say if the lun would copy from one san to another. It states:

The RDM pointer files of the virtual machine are recreated on a destination datastore. The RDMs of the virtual machine remain as RDMs when the process completes. The Virtual Disks are relocated.

so does that mean the lun and pointers move or just the pointers?

[Joshua_Mally]

It will move only the RDM pointers

SInce your on ESX3.5 and using VC 2.5 to enable Storage vmotion..u will have to download the free SVMotion VI Client Plugin.

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-Josh

Trying to learn