NAS Datastore hard drive swap question

[mlcooper54]

I can do a hard drive hotswap on my QNAP NAS.....as long as it's RAID 1. I have RAID 6 so I have to shut down my NAS to swap a hard drive.

Stupid question: can I shut down my NAS without shutting down all my VMs? I can make sure no changes are made to the VMs. Sorry, I'm looking for an easy way out<g>. I do not have storage vMotion enabled.

One of my HDDs in the NAS is throwing read errors during the self test.

Thanks,

Mark

[crawfordm · Accepted solution]

Without shutting down the VM's, you would have to move them to a different external storage device.  If you have not other storage to move the VM's to then your only option is to shut them down.

[mlcooper54]

Do I need to power down the hosts also?

Thanks for your help - Mark

[admin]

If you are running with limited no. of hosts in your environment, then you can continue your storage activity without powering off the host. If you can afford a downtime, then you can power down your host as well.

Hope it helps.

Navpreet

[mlcooper54]

I only have 2 hosts. Again, I'm just trying to limit the number of shutdowns. I'm doing this after normal business hours and don't want to stay all night. 12 - 13 VMs including my VDP and Replication appliances.

Thanks all - Mark