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All disks on SAN need to be replaced. Best way to back up VM's and data and restore onto new disks on SAN?

hi guys

We've got an HP Storageworks P2000 G3 dual controller, with 12 disks filling it up. They're all 7.2K LFF and each 1TB.

All of this is part of a blade enclosure. On the first blade, there's around 4 VM's, all of them Server 2008 R2. They each have different allocated disk spaces etc, ranging from around 2TB to 8TB. All of this disk space is sitting on the SAN itself.

We have symantec backup exec here and also Vmware Esx server. So, is there a recommendation on backing up all of this somehow and then restoring it to the new SAN environment.

How would you do it?

Thanks a lot
Yashy

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RickEpnet

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Yashy

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thanks guys. Well sadly we're not going to be buying a new SAN enclosure. We're only getting new disks (i.e. taking out the 7.2K's and replacing them with 15K's). Which I'm assuming means one thing: I have to do the entire thing as a backup onto some sort of external storage. Then take out the 7.2K's and insert 15K's, recreate all of the RAID's etc and restore the VM's onto each datastore?

RickEpnet

You know what I would do is if you have a good NAS hook it up to the ESX via ISCSI or NFS and shut down all the machines then migrate them to the NAS and then replace your drives and recreate you datastore then migrate the VMs back and power them up.

To be extra careful you could also back them up.