seperated vmdk files, best practice regarding lun placement and how to?

[HankVonHelvete]

Hello,

We have a small esx 4.1 setup with about 16 virtual machine. Due to rapid expansion, some of my virtual machines have vmdk files on different luns.

example:

virtual server 001     lun01: vs001.vmdk + vs001_1.vmdk + vs001_2.vmdk

                                lun02: vs001.vmdk

                                lun03: vs001.vmdk

where vs001.vmdk is the OS partition, and all the others are used for data storage. Note that the other vmdk are used in a windows server as a spanned volumes

questions:

1- Is there anything in best practices recommending not to split vmdks across multiple luns?

2- Because the vmdks are split on 2 luns, there is a redundancy in the naming. How can I move all the vmdks onto one lun and avoid conflict? I assumed i could snapshot the server onto a new lun?

[kjb007]

You can use storage vmotion to migrate all of the vmdk's to one LUN.  Upon doing that, the vmdk's will automatically be renamed, so there is no duplication in the name.

-KjB

[kjb007]

There is no best practice dictating placement on vmdk, other than for differing RAID types.  Generally, it is better to keep them together for simplciity and avoid duplication of names, as you see, but they can be on the same LUN if the underlying storage supports your application performance needs.

Right-click, select migrate, and select change datastore.  That should put  you into svmotion, and move the vmdk's to a datastore of your chosing.

-KjB