Storage VMotion now supported for iSCSI
Earlier this week the VMware VI Team Blog reported that as of ESX version 3.5 Update 1 Storage VMotion is now officially supported for iSCSI SANs. This means that administrators can reorganize virtual machines without down time in order to match any storage needs. The Storage VMotion and 10Gb Ethernet support for iSCSI SAN’s post explains:
“Although Storage VMotion is designed to work with any type of storage, it was initially supported only with Fibre Channel SANs. As of Update 1, Storage VMotion is supported with iSCSI SAN’s for moving virtual machine disk files in the following scenarios:
- From iSCSI SANs to other iSCSI SANs
- From iSCSI SANs to FibreChannel SANs
- From FibreChannel SANs to iSCSI SANs
In addition, we now support the use of 10Gb Ethernet for iSCSI in a VMware Infrastructure environment.”
In my experience Storage VMotion has worked great, but be careful with VMs that have higher I/O utilizations.
Much like what happens when you commit snapshots, the task takes longer to complete and users are more likely to experience loss of service when live migrating heavy I/O guests. Moving those same guests across the network to iSCSI storage will only add to the probability of brief server disconnects. Consider performing a Storage VMotion of these guests outside of normal business hours.
How do you know which VMs have the heaviest I/O? Use the VirtualCenter Performance data or esxtop from the Service Console to identify them!
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Tags: esx, esx3.5, iSCSI, SAN, storage, storagevmotion, virtualcenter, vmware
