vSphere- Existing Storage Migration?

leezer3

leezer3

leezer3

Soldato
Joined
18 Jan 2006
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Norwich
OK, so I've been trying to figure this out for several hours and not got very far :p

I'm at the stage where I'd like to migrate my fileserver to vSphere so I can run a second Windows VM alongside it.
The current specs are this:
Debian Wheezy
GA-P35-DS3L
Core2Duo e6420
4gb assorted DDR2
6tb storage over 7 assorted SATA drives strung off the Intel controller and a secondary PCI controller. These live in a 2.5TB LVM & 3 single drives.
All the system partitions live on a further 160gb SATA drive.

My current plan looks a little like this:
*Pull all drives other than the system drive.
*Run a P2V on the system drive, and then use the 160gb as the VM datastore.
*Connect the 3 single drives as RDM mapped devices to the new VM.

Where I'm unsure is what to do with the existing LVM. I've tried the VMWare docs and Google, but all I can really find is migrating machines with the boot partition *on* a LVM, not adding an existing LVM to a VM.
It's not the end of the world if I have to add some more drives and shift data around, but in principle I'd prefer to keep the existing LVM intact.

Thoughts please?
I know the CPU is probably a little underpowered, but there's nothing load critical on either proposed machine, and both of them were previously running quite happily on single core 939 chips.

-Leezer-
 
technically this would work, you just need to remap the rdm devices to the old sdX mappings in lvm, I would do some tests with a small lvm with no data on it to test and to make sure know the way to 'recover' the lvm
 
Short answer is that I haven't got as far as trying this yet.
In anticipation of this, I changed the SATA card for a VMWare supported HP P800, which in turn caused a board swap, as it disagreed with the Gigabyte board.

That didn't cause any problems for the server, but lead to a reinstall of Windows on the desktop. From there, I haven't got as far as actually trying it; The virtualisation isn't necessary, just a would-be-nice :)

Incidentally, I'm using UUID throughout the system, not the sdX mappings. UUID is certainly controller independent, so I wasn't anticipating problems on that front.
At the moment, it'll probably end up waiting a month or two, and then adding a 3tb drive and migrating the LVM data onto that. From there, I can rebuild completely within VMWare :)

-Leezer-
 
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