Migration path from Dell Equallogic to FAS3220

[ADMWWHITEHURST]

Need some guidence if possible guys.

We have a site with an Equallogic (50TBs) that we plan to migrate to a NetApp FAS3220.

Source:

Dell Equallogic

iSCSI LUNs (RDMs)

ESXi 5 IBM Hosts

Destination

NetApp FAS3220

NFS Datastores (No RDMS)

ESXi 5.5 Cisco Hosts

This is a virtual migration to get off of the older Equallogic/IBM system. We have a few large file servers with large format files (2-4TB) volumes. Outages can be taken nightly and on the weekends. Some of these servers will be replaced with newer VMs and we will use a process like ROBOCOPY or securecopy to migrate the data over to the newly staged replacement guests. My concern here is for the others. Can VMware Converter handle the conversion of the existings RDMs to VMDKs? If not, any thoughts on how I can accomplish this? Any thoughts on other ways of getting this accomplished??

Advice is appreciated!

[jonathon_lanzon · Accepted solution]

I recommend using Storage vMotion the whole way. It will make it easy and seamless for you. Check out http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1005241 for the VMware KB article to do this.

Note, a brief outage to each VM may be required if you need to change the VM's compatibility mode prior to the Storage vMotion.

On a side note, do you have CIFS available to you? If so, that would be a better option than having VM (Windows) file servers.

[ADMWWHITEHURST]

Thanks for the input Jonathon. Regarding CIFS we use DFS here and last I heard NetApp doesn't play well (or at all) with DFS so the need for a file server remains.

EDIT: just now looking at the link. Thanks again!

Thanks!

[jonathon_lanzon]

Will Whitehurst wrote:
Thanks for the input Jonathon. Regarding CIFS we use DFS here and last I heard NetApp doesn't play well (or at all) with DFS so the need for a file server remains. 

NetApp CIFS works fine if you're just using DFS to create dynamic share paths off a common root. However you can't use NetApp CIFS with DFS-R, a function for having file shares active-active across different geographic locations.

Personally, unless you *need* DFS-R, CIFS off a filer is a better option providing much better flexibility.