Temporary Storage vMotion

[sergeadam]

I have 2 ESXi 5.0 hosts, under an Essentials Plus license, attached to a SAN. We are planning to replace the SAN. The least disruptive way to do that would be to attach the new SAN to the configuration and Storage vMotion the VMs off the old SAN. The installation is about 6-7 months old, so outside the eval period. Is there a way to enable Storage vMotion for a short period of time ( a week or 2) without upgrading the license? 

Or is there other software that could do it?

[vmroyale]

Hello.

What SANs are you working with here?

Good Luck!

[weinstein5]

There are a couple of ways to do this - the easiest IMO but will require some down time is to cold migrate the VM which will allow you relocate the storage. Another option would be to use VMware Converter and create a new VM on the other host on the new storage -

[sergeadam]

Dell EQ PS4000, both of them.

[sergeadam]

Some of the VMs could be cold migrated. Most are customer facing and one is 6TB in size. cold migration would have it down too long. I've had bad results using converter on a live machine.

[vmroyale]

The EQ replication feature is pretty easy, although it will require downtime for the VMs.  I would recommend this route.