Urgent query: Safe to sVmotion a failed-over VM?

[pkelly_sts]

I'm currently in a failover scenario on one of our small sites & it turns out our destination VMFS isn't the best candidate to keep running the failed-over VMs. Is there any significant impact of performing a local sVmotion (i.e. to another VMFS on the same host server) whilst we're in a fail-over state?

I imagine we're likely to make it a permanent failover but that decision hasn't been taken just yet.

[foggy]

Hi Paul, this needs to be checked, since I cannot guarantee we'd be able to failback or permanently failover in case replica changes its datastore. I believe you could ask support for assistance or check it yourself on some smaller VM.

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Paul, I would suggest to do permanent failover and then run the sVmotion operation. Please keep in mind that you would be able to migrate back to production (if needed) via configuring new replication job and then mapping this VM replica to the production VM.

[pkelly_sts]

OK, thanks for prompt reply. Not really in a position to check much so think we might have to live with it until someone decides to make failover permanent.

Turns out we've been replicating 4 VMs, including a SQL server, to a single 600Gb disk in the other host - far from ideal! I have a RAID-1 300Gb VMFS available on the same host but not big enough to hold all VMs.

Great start to my monday... :-/

[pkelly_sts]

Hi Paul, I would suggest to do permanent failover and then run the sVmotion operation. Please keep in mind that you would be able to migrate back to production (if needed) via configuring new replication job and then mapping this VM replica to the production VM.

Ah, thanks Vitaly, that's very useful to know...

[pkelly_sts]

OK, so I've made the failover permanent for one of the VMs, it still has the 3 configured RPs tied to it, should I delete/merge these before doing the sVmotion, or is it safe/ok to bring them over too? It's highly unlikely that we'll be reverting to any of those snapshots so I'm not overly precious about them...

[PTide]

Hi,

As per VMware KB, storage vMotion with snapshots is supported in ESXi5.0 and above, so it's OK to migrate them. Please take a look at this documentation to learn more.

Thanks

[foggy]

However, permanent failover should remove all existing replica VM snapshots. Are you sure you're looking at the correct VM?

[pkelly_sts]

Ah, apologies guys, your'e right (and I thought that was the case) the snapshots have been removed & I WAS looking at incorrect VM - sorry!