Standard image to HA?

EinsteinTaylor · Fri Sep 07, 2012 1:09 am

Hey everyone,
I finally have everything dialed in the way I want it but I'm wondering if it is possible to convert an existing target/image to HA without having to take it offline. This is serving up a large VMFS datastore and I would like to turn it into an HA target. Of course the datastore ID has to remain the same or else one would have to make the new HA target(which I don't have space for on the existing node) and them sVmotion everything.

Any tips?

Fri Sep 07, 2012 1:43 pm

You have used *.img file, correct?

EinsteinTaylor · Fri Sep 07, 2012 2:12 pm

Yes. No dedup or anything. Just plain img

EinsteinTaylor · Fri Sep 07, 2012 4:30 pm

Any chance this is doable?

Fri Sep 07, 2012 6:04 pm

Why not?

You need to destroy target and device, but keep the image file. After you should use this file to create the HA device. Please note that you will need to initiate synchronization in proper direction to do not lose the data.

EinsteinTaylor · Fri Sep 07, 2012 6:13 pm

The problem with that approach is that with running VM's inside of it, they are taken offline from the ESX hosts, and when you bring it back online the new HA target has a different ID from the existing target so ESX doesn't know how to find his VM's.

Mon Sep 10, 2012 8:47 am

1. We will work on "storage motion" feature analogue
2. I think it is possible to import VM form new datastore, correct?

EinsteinTaylor · Mon Sep 10, 2012 2:59 pm

It is possible but not without at least some downtime. What I'm thinking is it would be nice if there was a way to just like right click and add HA partner, similar to how you can change an HA partner in an already existing one.

Tue Sep 11, 2012 6:15 am

Good news and bad news...

Bad news - you cannot do it now w/o downtime (as you've already noticed)...

Good news - we're working on implementing this functionality right now so with upcoming release you'd be able to upgrade any existing non-HA device to HA mode with a variable number of partners.
W/o bringing down connected clients of course (read - no downtime).

Sorry for inconvinence and thank you for your suggestion

EinsteinTaylor wrote:It is possible but not without at least some downtime. What I'm thinking is it would be nice if there was a way to just like right click and add HA partner, similar to how you can change an HA partner in an already existing one.