So here's the scenario: We have a VM sitting on an ESXi 4.1 farm that has 5 2TB RDMs attached. We are migrating off of our current SAN to a new EMC SAN. For the rest of our VMs we are doing vmotions and storage vmotions to move them to our 5.0 farm which is on our current SAN. That part is no problem. But what do we do for this one? We woud like to get rid of the RDMs and move to standard vmdk files for each drive.
My thoughts are to use converter to do a v2v migration. We did this a few months ago with some "large" VMs but the biggest one topped out at 2.5TB. I ran the hot sync which took 2 full days, and then the final conversion only took 90 minutes or so. So the plan would be for this 10TB monster to run the v2v hot, let it take a week? maybe more, then during a downtime window run the true-up final conversion. Only problem with this approach is that we have no clue how long it will actually take. There are millions of files on this VM, so trying to guesstimate a conversion time is going to be exactly that, at best.
Any other suggestions on the best way to approach this? We don't have any SAN replication tools available, so we can't just replicate, switch the LUNs over and keep them as RDMs. We figure since we have to migrate this data we want to get rid of the RDMs as well. Has anyone done a conversion of this size before? Any other ideas?