Shared Storage accross vCenter and vSphere

[hr7]

Is it possible to share storage, LUNS presented by Fibre Channel across two ESX clusters that are managed by different virtual centers?

I could potentially see that working without a problem for a vmfs datastores. How about VMs with RDMs?

The idea is to move the datastores and RDMs from a 3.5 update 4 cluster to a 4.0.2 cluster. Again both being managed by seperate vCenters.

Thanks.

[glynnd1]

That will work fine. In fact it is something that would expected during migrations, and in normal everyday use - eg a volume containing ISO shared out to many hosts or clusters.

[AntonVZhbankov]

>Is it possible to share storage, LUNS presented by Fibre Channel across two ESX clusters that are managed by different virtual centers?

Yes. VMFS is absolutely independent from vCenter.

>The idea is to move the datastores and RDMs from a 3.5 update 4 cluster to a 4.0.2 cluster. Again both being managed by seperate vCenters.

But why? Why can't you manage both clusters with single vCenter 4.0u2?

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MCSA, MCTS Hyper-V, VCP 3/4, VMware vExpert

http://blog.vadmin.ru

[hr7]

Client wants to have two seperate management platforms. The upgrade will not only be software but hardware for the ESX servers. Here's the proposed steps below.

1. Storage VMotion to a data store that is connected to both environments

2. Shut down the VM

3. Unregister the VM from vCenter

4. Register the VM in vSphere

5. Start VM and upgrade VM Tools

6. Shut down VM and upgrade VM Hardware

7. Remove floppy drive

8. Change SCSI controllers to SAS (not boot drive controller)

9. Add VMXNET 3 NIC(s)

10. Configure VM settings to allow hot add of memory resources

11. Start VM

12. Configure network to use new NIC(s)

13. Remove E1000 NIC(s)