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jkeegan123Flag for United States of America

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VMWare VSphere 5 Cluster - what is the best way to connect a large file store LUN to a guest VM on a SAN?

I have a VMWare VSphere 5 cluster with:

(3) Hosts with (10) NICs in each, 64 GB of memory in each
(1) Dell Equallogic SAN
(2) Storage switches for the dedicated iSCSI LAN

One of the guest VM's has a large file store (1TB) that is currently being hosted as a pass-thru disk on a Hyper-V cluster...in this configuration, the file store is a LUN on the same Dell Equallogic SAN that hosts data for the VMWare cluster.  We are migrating the Hyper-V VM's into the VMWare cluster, and the last VM to get migrated is this file server.  The Hyper-V configuration has this file store LUN as a pass-thru disk that is a storage resource in Windows Failover cluster manager.  This LUN is configured to be a physical disk that is passed-thru into the Hyper-V guest through Hyper-V manager (standard pass-thru storage configuration for Hyper-V)..

What is the best way to present this LUN to the VMWare guest VM once we import the Hyper-V guest VM into VMWare?  Should we:

1.  Add the file-store LUN to VMWare storage resources by connecting to it in iSCSI software adapter, and assign that storage to the file-server guest VM?
2.  Add pass-thru NICs into the file server guest VM that connect to a vSwitch and VMKernel on the storage network, and configure the guest VM (Windows 2008 R2 standard x64) to make iSCSI connections to the LUN on its own?
3.  Is there another way to do this that is not described?
Avatar of Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
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1 & 2 are methods you can use.

But there is a third option where you can present the existing LUN with data to a Virtual Machine it's called RDM (Raw Device Mapping). (very much the same as Hyper-V)

see here

http://www.vmadmin.co.uk/vmware/35-esxserver/58-rdmvm
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Avatar of Jim Millard
Jim Millard
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