The question is probably directed at Grim. I'm using vSphere for the first time. I have several VMs already built on the system. They're currently using the local drives in the server blades. I'm getting access to a SAN and I need to move everything that was built on those drives over to that. I'm guessing I'll create a new datastore for the SAN but after that can I copy the system from the drives datastore to that datastore?
Yes you can. Once you've setup the datastore just right click the VM and choose migrate, you'll then get the option to move the host, the storage or both. Just do the storage. Depending on which license for ESX you have will depend on whether or not you have vmotion and can do it live. If not just shut the VM down. Vmotion is a godsend for maintenance, can move VMs live and be able to shut a server down to work on or update it. If you're going iSCSI and have multiple NICs on the vLan connected to the SAN set the multipathing to round robin. If you have multiple hosts that you want to be able to access the same VMs for redundancy/fail over then enable multiple iSCSI connections on the LUN/volume at the SAN.
I always suspected the IT guys at work didn't really know what they were doing in certain situations, and this confirms it.
One example: project servers. They always reach maximum capacity at a certain time of the year, but IT never bothers to have a system in place for freeing up space before it becomes an issue. They just wait until people tell them that files can't be saved or copied anymore, then jury-rig a temporary solution that doesn't work very well for about a week. Happens every year. It's almost like they don't even know how to check the remaining disk space on a daily basis.
Well if it's anything like my situation we rent the storage from a data center. It's expensive as hell so we don't order extra space. We also only make one payment a year. So even thought I might be able to spend $5000 in October it's almost impossible to get even $5 for the SAN any other time. It's a total pain.
SANs are expensive in general, our last Dell Equallogic with 24 x 600GB drives was £14,000. That is including Dells 4hr gold support though. Everything in corperate IT is expensive these days. This week I've spent £10,500 on new AIOs for staff, £2,700 on next years VMware support agreement and £12,500 on a new module for our CRM system. The only thing we have farmed out is exchange. Everyone wants access to email everywhere these days and it was more cost effective to rent exchange and let someone else deal with security. We do have cloud storage for our Veeam backups too but we also keep a copy at 2 sites and on tape each day. Can never be too careful!