Move Lun from one disk group to another

[MrEdu]

We currently have 3 disk groups on an EVA 4100. This EVA is servicing our esx 3.0.2 Cluster.

Disk Group 1 = 8 146GB 15K drives = 1 Vraid1 250GB lun
Disk Group 2 = 32 146GB 10K drives = 3 Vraid5 800GB luns
Disk Group 3 = 16 300GB 15K drives = not assigned yet)

What options do I have on moving the luns on Disk Group 2 to Disk Group 3. Then when they are moved collapse Disk Group 2 to add more drives to Disk Group 3. I know I can move luns via Command View and I am assuming that if I do their wwn and uuid remain the same. So there would be no need mess with the san config on esx.

Any thoughts, comments, or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.



Looking for thoughts options or ideas

[IBaltay]

Hi,
here is the EVA perf best practices from which you can see that mixing the 10k and 15k HDD in one DG is not a best perf idea:
ftp://ftp.compaq.com/pub/products/storageworks/whitepapers/5982-9140EN.pdf

[IBaltay]

also mixing the capacities in one DG is not a good best perf idea...

[MrEdu]

Thank you for that information. But my real question is what options do I have to move luns from 1 disk group to the other. I am planning on decomissioning the 146 10K Disk Group however it already has active luns that are being used. Has anyone used the move feature in command view to move luns from one disk group to the other?

Thanks!

[Abdul Rashid]

You can not move LUNs from one Disk Group to another, you can only move to another folder within the same Disk Group. The best way is to clone the LUN and create the clone into a diferent Disk Group. You need the Business Copy licence to use the cloning facility.

[Uwe Zessin]

The [Move] button is used to relocate an object to a different folder - all other characteristics are not changed.

[IBaltay]

then the quickest idea could be mix the new disks into the the existing DG2 (with addition of 8 physical disks at a time), wait for the group and leveling procedures and after that ungroup the old disks from the DG2.

[AWilliams_1 · Accepted solution]

You could also just create new VMFS LUNs in the 300GB group and migrate the VMs one at a time into the new LUNs. This would require downtime of each VM with your current version of ESX. If you are planning an upgrade to the latest version of ESX (I think it is V4) then you can do a VMotion of the Virtual Disks while the VMs are still running.

[Uwe Zessin]

V4 (I don't remember if the official name is still secret - so many NDAs...) is not available, yet. But storage VMotion works with V3.5 (U1?, U2?) already.

[MrEdu]

Thanks to everyone for their replies. From them I gathered the following options.

1) Snapclone then modify the uuid and other info. I was able to confirm that you could snapclone across different diskgroups

2) vm migrate (good old vmware)

3) vmotion (do not have 3.5 yet)

I decided to go with the vmware migrate. I have used it before and it worked well. Slow for large volumes but worked everytime.

Now all I have to do is delete the luns that were moved ungroup some disks and install some more 300 15K drives into their respective disk group. What a match made in heaven HP and VMware!

Once again Thanks to all and the job is done!