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March 27th, 2012 19:00
Looking for advice to move data from one SAN to another
Greetings,
I'm using VMware vSphere 4.0 and a Dell Equal Logic PS6000 iSCSI SAN. We'll call this "SAN A". VMware has 5 hosts (M710 blades) and the SAN has approx 30 TB of data.
My company is moving to another physical location. For the move we've borrowed another Dell Equal Logic PS6000 iSCSI SAN. We'll call this "SAN B".
What I need to do is migrate all of the data from "SAN A" to "SAN B".
Once the data has been migrated "SAN B" will be moved to the new physical location. In one year "SAN A" will be moved to this location as well.
The two locations are connected via a 200 Mbps LAN extension.
My question is, what is the best way to move the data from SAN A to SAN B ?
Ideally I'd like to use VMware to storage vMotion all of the virtual machines, but from my understanding sVmotion will use the 1 Gbps Mgmt VMKernel port (this could take a while). Is it faster to use replication while they're on the same LAN ? Does anyone know how fast the replication will take ?
I would also like to use replication but I don't know if the LAN extension will support the transfer due to intermediary firewalls, routing, and jumbo frames.
Thanks,
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MichaelDavis
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March 28th, 2012 10:00
Storage vMotion would be the best method as there would be no downtime for the VMs.
With replication at some point you will have to power down your VMs and disconnect the datastores so you can get consistency between the two SANs. Then you'd promote the replicas and attach ESX to the datastores on the new SAN.
It comes down to whether a slower migration with no downtime, or faster with downtime is more acceptable.
As for speed you can use an external drive to 'seed' the initial replication; this results in less data going over the network which will help greatly on a slower LAN/WAN.