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Endaar
Old Timer
USA
567 Posts
Status: offline |
 Posted - 12/23/2011 : 10:06:31 AM
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Taking a shot in the dark here as I can't seem to find anything via Google...
I've got a bunch of datastores presented from my SAN to my VMWare cluster via FC. I need to upgrade the (only) FC switch, but I also need to keep a couple VMs running if possible. My SAN supports iSCSI as well, so I'm wondering if I can un-assign the datastores from FC and reassign them via iSCSI without breaking things too badly on the VMWare side. The SAN doesn't care either way.
Has anyone tried this?
Thanks,
James
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NMDANGE
Honorable But Hopeless Addict
USA
2054 Posts
Status: offline |
Posted - 12/23/2011 : 3:56:57 PM
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| Well you definitely can't have any running VMs on a particular volume when you do the reassignment. VMWare will lose access to the volume during this process. If you have enough free space you could use Storage VMotion to do one volume at a time, vmotion all the vms to the new volume, then do the next one, and repeat. |
Michael D'Angelo
(former)MVP-MIIS, Pace University Senior Systems Administrator (Windows)
(MS)NMDANGE
PhoeniX WorX Systems Administrator. If you play Total Annihilation, please join us. http://www.phoenixworx.org |
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cj_berlin
Honorable But Hopeless Addict
Germany
3964 Posts
Status: offline |
Posted - 12/26/2011 : 11:52:19 AM
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| If iSCSI and FC is indeed handled by THE SAME storage processor on the SAN side, it's a simple path failover scenario and should be possible without any downtime. Just establish the iSCSI connection and you should see an additional path to your datastore. Set this new path as the only active one and you can take your FC switch down. |
Evgenij Smirnov
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Endaar
Old Timer
USA
567 Posts
Status: offline |
Posted - 01/03/2012 : 08:33:11 AM
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quote:
Originally posted by cj_berlin
If iSCSI and FC is indeed handled by THE SAME storage processor on the SAN side, it's a simple path failover scenario and should be possible without any downtime. Just establish the iSCSI connection and you should see an additional path to your datastore. Set this new path as the only active one and you can take your FC switch down.
Wow, that's good to know. I'll have to look into that for redundancy going forward.
As it turns out, even on my lowly Brocade 200E FC switch, firmware updates are non-disruptive, so no downtime was necessary.
Thanks for the feedback.
James |
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deandownsouth
Old Timer
USA
439 Posts
Status: offline |
Posted - 01/14/2012 : 8:22:42 PM
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quote:
Originally posted by cj_berlin
If iSCSI and FC is indeed handled by THE SAME storage processor on the SAN side, it's a simple path failover scenario and should be possible without any downtime. Just establish the iSCSI connection and you should see an additional path to your datastore. Set this new path as the only active one and you can take your FC switch down.
It is/was my understanding in vSphere that you can not have the same path to a LUN shared between FC and iSCSI or more specifically, in a multipath arrangement, one path iSCSI and the other FC-even if the same SP is being used since it would be a different path and protocol. Is that no longer the case?
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Mark Dean
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cj_berlin
Honorable But Hopeless Addict
Germany
3964 Posts
Status: offline |
Posted - 01/15/2012 : 05:23:45 AM
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Mark,
this is a valid question and surely using such a configuration in production as an Active/Active MP scenario is still not recommended.
But I am pretty sure we have this running in the lab. Will recheck and report back.
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Evgenij Smirnov
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ESX 4 - Change datastore from FC to iSCSI
