P2V when server has lun

[HendersonD]

I have a software product that indexes all of my email before archiving it. The system requirements for this software called for a 1TB drive to store the indexes. Since the server I wanted to use did not have this much direct attached storage, I carved out a 1TB lun from my Netapp filer and presented this to the server via iSCSI. We started indexing email in October and when I looked at this recently, realized that these indexes will only chew up a fraction of this space. The physical server that this runs on is very underutilized so it is a great candidate for a P2V.

My question surrounds how to handle the lun. This is what I thought of doing. Use VM Converter to do a P2V. In the process, resize the lun as a much smaller disk. In the end then I would have two disks on this VM, one for the Windows Server OS and one to hold the indexes. Once I down the physical server and bring up the virtual one I am thinking this VM will try and mount the disks from the luns. Before bringing it up, I can offline these luns on my Netapp filer. On the VM I can uninstall Snapdrive (which came over in the P2V since it is on the current physical machine) and then restart the VM. Once everything is working fine, I can get rid of the old luns.

Does this sound like a good way to handle this?

[rriva]

If you P2V your phisical machine, creating two local virtual disk, when you power on the VMs you don't need anymore you iSCSI LUN and the VMs will try to contact it because the phisical machine need it.

If you power on (only the first time) your virtual machine in recovery mode (by pressing F8 during the boot) you can remove all phisical hardware you don't need anymore and also all the reference for your iSCSI SAN).

Otherwise you can P2V your machine, converting only the first disk, and leave your VM using iSCSI.

Then, add a new disk to the VM, copy or move all files from the SAN to your local disk, and with a little downtime, change the path for your mail indexes from iSCSI SAN to your newly created local disk.

Hope to be clear.

Bye

Riccardo Riva

VCP,RHCE,FCNSA

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