E200 to P400 upgrade + VMWare ESX

[M.T.Salisbury]

I have a situation where we are upgrading the controller in a ML350 G5 server with ESX 3.5 installed. I've read in other cases with Windows where the server can be shut down, old controller removed, new controller inserted, plugs in, boot up with no other configuration required (i.e. don't need to take a backup before, recreate the RAID set on the new controller, and then restore to the new config). Is this the case with ESX also?

Thanks, much appreciated.

[TTr]

The raid configuration of a controller is saved on each and every disk that is connected to the controller. When the controller is powered up, it reads the configuration from the disks and uses it. It has nothing to do with the OS that is using the controller.
What you propose to do is correct but taking a backup of your data as well as the raid configuration before changing the controllers is always a good practice.

[Uwe Zessin]

You might want to make yourself familiar with the process of resignaturing a VMFS - just in case the P400 introduces enough changes for ESX to believe this is a snapshot volume.