How to migrate Equallogic volumes to VxRail

Thanks Joerg. I'll look into that.

So your Windows VM uses Guest iSCSI to access the data rather than using VMDKs.

The vxRAIL is a HCI solution with vSAN. Yes, it is possible to setup a iSCSI Target on vSAN buts thats not what youre looking for.

So i would say there is no way to migrate the Volume... you have to migrate the data :(.

If your File server uses DFS from Microsoft it should be very simply ... otherwise you have to look for a Filecopy tool (there is more than robocopy) like "Secure Copy" for example.

Think about your current backup and restore. You can try a restore into a additional vDisk of your current VM which is based on a VMDK. Later you can use svMotion to migrate the VM.

Regards,
Joerg

Thanks Don. I'll look into that too.

We sort of are in the same situation but trying to convert EQ (NTFS) volumes using iscsi to vmdk files on the SAN.  You take the iscsi volume that is directly connected by the guest and convert it to a virtual RDM and then add it back to the guest.

After that is complete, you can live storage vmotion to a new volume to its permanent home and it will convert the virtual RDM to a vmdk file. 

We have done this with a few servers.  Down time is about 10 minutes to convert the iscsi volume to RDM with all the mouse clicks..you can probably do it faster if scripted using vSphere API 

Thanks,

Scott

Out of interested, how has the move from Traditional Server/SAN to vxRail been for you?  We are thinking of making the jump soon, but I feel me might need something else for the larger unstructured file server VMs.

Any gotcha's and real world experience would gratefully received.

Thanks.

The move for us has been quite easy. We simply used VMware VConverter to move our VM's from the old Server/SAN (Dell Equallogic) environment to the VxRail. For the unstructured file server VMs I'm going to build new W2012 fileservers and most likely robocopy or restore the data from backup over a weekend.

To be honest the company I work for are a very small operation so I only had 7 virtual PC's and 9 virtual servers to convert. I was under no time pressure to do these conversions as my Dell Equallogic SAN is still under maintenance. In general my VM's took anything from 30 to 60 minutes each to complete.

By the way VxRail does support iscsi (see page 85 of the VxRail appliance text book) www.emc.com/.../h15104-vxrail-appliance-techbook.pdf

Cool, if you don't mind me asking, how many VM's, how much data and how long did the whole project take?

I was kinda hoping we could just attach 1 vxrail node into the old iscsi network and vmotion... no such luck.

Ah, so can you actually add the old hosts into the vcenter that is bundled with the vxrail solution?

Yes that's what I understand.