VDI - FCP LUNs to NFS

[irobinson1]

I know this may be a complicated and very detailed queston but I'm just looking for a general idea of what is all involved in converting a VDI infastructure from FCP to NFS.  Keep in mind I have about 2100 VDI instances.  Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[amiller_1]

In short, data migration. Your options revolve around....

• VM data relocation (in VirtualCenter with the VM shut down) -- manual process
• Storage vMotion (not officially supported from FC to NFS but no problems for at all so far or multiple other people I've talked to) -- manual process but scriptable via rcli
• depending on VDI configuration (independent, pools, etc.), adjusting the pool parameters and reprovisioning VM's on a new NFS datastore
• some mix of everything above.

Hopefully helpful -- just let me know if anything above doesn't make sense.

[abhinavj]

Hi Ivory,

What is the driver for migrating the environment from FC to NFS?

Regards,

Abhinav

[amiller_1]

Not to secondguess too much...but possibly some of these...

http://viroptics.pancamo.com/2007/11/why-vmware-over-netapp-nfs.html

[irobinson1]

Just moving forward.  We are on FCP LUNS and the benefits of NFS look they are better considering we are approching 2500 VM clients.

[keitha]

Ivory,

I suspect you have a very high number of FC LUNs. Likely the biggest gain would be the ability to place a much greater number of VMs per data store. Many fewer objects for you to manage. Andrews suggestions on how to migrate were right on. I am curious which of the techniques you think you would likely use to migrate?

Keith

[amiller_1]

Phew....that's a lot of VM's/a lot of datastores....NFS would be nice if only for that. There's also some future-looking stuff posted in the reply here.

http://communities.netapp.com/message/8975

And finally, RCU 2.0 may be invaluable for you (single-file FlexClone for fast VM rollouts integrated into a VirtualCenter GUI).

[irobinson1]

Thanks guys.  This is great info.