Storage VMotion Status

[cjorli]

My company is new to VMWare. We have 2 ESX 4.0.0, 164009 hosts and a vCenter server. Our SAN front-end is Datacore SANMelody with a variety of storage as a backend. Everything is currently connected via iSCSI.

I am attempting to VMotion a File Server from our Production SAN (15k RPM SAS Array) to a new datastore on our Dev SAN (7200 RPM SATA Array). The relocation is datastore only, so the server is still on the same host. The total amount of data is about 1.6TB. I started the relocation on 1/26 at 4:00PM. 43 hrs later, the status for the transfer is still at 18%. If I browse the new target datastore, I see all the expected files. Questions:

• Is this timeframe normal for such a large data transfer considering the downgrade in drive speed?

• If so, is there any way other than the Status indicator in the vSphere Client/vCenter connection to determine the progress of the transfer?

• If this isn't a normal timeframe, is it possible to stop and resume the transfer?

Unfortunately having a LUN this size is not ideal, but I inherited some poor practices from my predecessor. Move the VM to the Dev datastore is the first step in my process to undo these practices. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[danm66]

hard to say how long it would take to move and I don't know of any way to verify that the display is correct in the amount of data it has moved, but I haven't seen it be far off before, either.

IMO, with that size of disk, I'd use an RDM for the data drive.

[cjorli]

So should I just continue to let it run? Or should I cancel the relocation and start it again? Have you ever seen a storage vMotion take this long before?

[dnetz]

Is your SAN still registering disk writes? That's sadly the best information you'll get on a svmotion, there doesn't seem to be a way of measuring the actual progress. I've done a 9 hour svmotion once between two NFS datastores, that was only around 350GB data but it will all depend on your SAN's and the network in between.

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[cjorli]

The transfer failed on Saturday. I have a support ticket in with VMWare concerning the issue.

[cjorli]

This was intended for my support ticket.

[samkRedstone]

While there no direct way of checking I usually go to the target datastore summary page and you can see the provisioned storage value increasing you do have to do a manual redresh now and then but at least you see something is happening. :smileyhappy: