Just to clarify on V-Motion. V-motion moves the resources (memory, CPU execution) to another VMware server not the VMDK files. With ESX 3.5 (due for release very soon) there will be a new feature called storage V-Motion which will hot migrate the VMDK files as well as the execution to another ESX server and backend LUN.
As far as my previous suggestion of using snap mirror to migrate the data to another volume/SATA shelves, this has worked for me in the past. Although not supported I have found hot snapping the VM luns via snap mirror ( with VMware ) would work but the machines on the target volume would act as if they were un-expectedly shutdown. The downtime involved in this type of operation is the time it takes to shutdown the VM's, remap the igroups to the destination volume Luns and power the machines back on.
Obviously if you want to guarantee consistency you would want to power down the machines before initializing the final snap mirror sync.
-----Original Message----- From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com] On Behalf Of Robert Lazzurs Sent: Thursday, December 06, 2007 3:06 AM To: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: Re: Can you allocate space from one aggregate to a volume on another?
We are currently using VirtualIron which supports LiveMigrate. This requires that the LUN not change, it does not copy the storage data.
Thanks however, take care.
On Dec 6, 2007 4:18 AM, Leeds, Daniel dleeds@edmunds.com wrote:
can't you just use vmware vmotion to move things over live without
downtime?
setup a new vmware lun on your sata aggregate, vmotion them over live
im no vmware expert but i think this is pretty straight forward.
-- Daniel Leeds Manager, Storage Operations Edmunds, Inc. 1620 26th Street, Suite 400 South Santa Monica, CA 90404
310-309-4999 desk 310-430-0536 cell
-----Original Message----- From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com on behalf of Robert Lazzurs Sent: Wed 12/5/2007 7:53 PM To: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: Re: Can you allocate space from one aggregate to a volume on another?
On Dec 5, 2007 3:39 PM, Brent Wilkinson bwilkinson@vmware.com wrote:
" Yes, just to be clear with everyone it was about moving the data from FC storage to SATA storage.
We have started this by doing a vol copy to move the LUN's that were offline from FC to SATA and we are going to look at ReplicatorX for the rest.
If anyone has any further suggestions please let me know :)"
I like to use Snapmirror for data moves personally. Having the ability
to
do
a final incremental sync before bringing the new volume online is nice.
The problem I have is these LUNs are for running VM's and our customers would not be so accepting of the downtime involved. If there is any way of doing this without user downtime then that has to be the path for us.
Really we need OnTAP GX with NFS based storage for the local disks of the VM's however that is a little while away in the environment we are using, maybe in our next cluster ;)
Take care