Migrating volumes between clusters?

[Paul Hutchings]

When migrating volumes between clusters, assuming your servers (vSphere 4.1 and Windows 2008 R2) have source and destination VIP's in their discovery target list, would you expect to have to disconnect/reconnect or to have the iSCSi initiator handle the change of VIP/cluster?

[Reginald Swensen · Accepted solution]

In my experience moving volumes is an entirely seamless affair as long as the VIPs for both clusters are known to the VMWare servers (or the VM guests) depending on how you have the volumes mounted. I have 3 clusters in the same subnet. All are on a common management group so migrating volumes between them is simple. The servers never notice the migration and I have done it in the middle of the workday under full load with no noticable effect.

[Paul Hutchings]

Thanks Reginald. I've migrated a few volumes yesterday and today and sure enough whilst you see a few "dead" connections show in the CMC new ones seem to appear - I think it's just a case of having faith/patience but from the OS perspective (tried it on vSphere and within a Windows guest) it does appear seamless which is great.

[jimmywayne]

One thing to add to all that. The volume is logged in using the gateway of the old cluster. When you log out and then log back in, it uses the gateway/vip of the cluster it was moved to. Best to log out and log back in at first opportunity.

[Reginald Swensen]

In our experience we did not have to disconnect or reconnect. I simply initiated a migration between two of our clusters (in the same management group) by editing volume information to change the cluster. The VMware 4.1 (ESXi) servers and associated Windows / Linux servers that use the volume in question simply continued to operate normally throughout the migration. In fact I have done this many times without even telling the server admins and they never even realize it. Of course, all our VMware servers have all three of our cluster VIPs listed in their ISCSI Initiators. One more fact that may be relevant is that all three of our clusters have their VIPs located on the same TCP/IP subnet.

[RPMCanes]

Question:  Let's say you are migrating volumes, but you've just added the 10Gb option and want to move all your StoreVirtual traffic over to that interface?

[Ravi_K]

Hi

Migrating volumes to didderent Cluster / Host and adding 10G NIC on the storage are two separate things. As already stated by some experts that volumes can be migrated online, adding 10G NIC to the storage and in order to make it active iSCSI connection requires a small downtime. There is a migration guide to 10G available in manuals download section, let me know if you need it.

Regards

Ravi