SAN migration final

Well, as expected Murphy had to show up after everything had been going so well in the first part.

After connecting the ESX hosts to the new SAN we ran into what seems to be a documented problem: a LUN that is incorrectly detected as being a snapshot and therefore acces is restricted to that LUN.

This gives the problem that in the VI client you cannot see that Shared Storage resources. The solution is to flag LVM.DisallowSnapshotLUN to zero and rescan the drives. The problem we had is that ESX still thinks these are snapshot LUN’s. After some discussion we decided to remove all VM’s and re-add them to the inventory. This seems to work.

We will have to wait on final say from VMWare support what we do about this.

SAN migration status

For those who are interested: we are now in our second day of the SAN migration from MSA1000’s to an EMC CX3-40.

So far everything is going OK, with a few hiccups yesterday evening. The speed of the migration (we use EMC’s SANCopy for the data move) has surprised us with seven out nine LUN’s ready by yesterday six o’clock in the evening. Two LUN’s from one MSA, with primarily fileserver data, didn’t copy over normally. We suspect because of the controller having difficulties with the I/O load. After the EMC consultant rescheduled the copy jobs and moved them to another storage processor on the CX they competed fine at nine o’clock yesterday.

All that is left now (…) is to patch the fibers to the new Cisco MDS9020 SAN switches, configure the zones for the servers / LUN’s and bring the servers online with their new storage.