Taking one SAN down. Do ESX hosts need to be down?

[Jae_Ellers]

We're using luns from 2x HP EVA 8000 SANs. We only have a few vms on the new system. The SAN folks are moving the physical box next weekend. I'm hoping to get away with just taking the vms running off the new SAN luns down and leaving the rest running.

Can anyone comment on the wisdom of this intent? I figure I'll see broken paths during the downtime, but would this cause any other problems for the vms running from the other SAN?

[admin]

You may be able to get away with just powering off the VMs.

You will more than likely need to rescan the SAN a couple of times and/or reboot the host.

Why is it an issue to power off the host during this maintenance?

Message was edited by:

BrianG

[Jae_Ellers]

there are 4 hosts & 52 other vms in the cluster. All hosts currently have this lun presented from the new san that must go down.

[dblake15]

You can also just suspend the guests and not take them down. Here is a script you can use

vmware-cmd -l | awk '\{cfg = $_} {command = "vmware-cmd \"" $cfg "\" suspend hard"} \{print cfg} \{system(command)}'

Just ssh and run that on the host. Copy and paste since it is pretty long. I have done this many times when doing any SAN maintenance.

[Jae_Ellers]

True, but I'm a little paranoid taking suspending MS SMS servers for a while since when they wakeup they'll have to catch up with their time and all the SMS backlog.

We have to move the 1000# san up onto an earthquake platform. This could be a couple hours.

Message was edited by:

Jae Ellers

[dblake15]

Well if you are worried about that then it would not be a problem to just shut the guests down. Also, that little script I gave you does all of the guests on the host. So something good if you have to do quick maintenance on a host, like replace fiber cables or moving SAN. Much easier than clicking them all one at a time. Keep it for your records.