Home / server / Questions / 661267
Accepted
Reaces
Asked: 2015-01-22 07:28:52 +0800 CST

Moving a large spanned volume across vm's

  • 772

Current situation:

Windows server 2008r2 running under VMWare esxi5.5.
3TB drive consisting of 3x 1TB virtual disks under a spanned volume. (D)
The drive contains approx 1,9TB of data.
D drive hosts 30+ SQL Server database files.
Several other instances are hosted on different drives.

We want to move this 3TB drive to a new server.
The new server will have the same OS version and SQL-server version.
It will however have more resources, and be completely dedicated to this one SQL-server instance.

What we're considering:

  1. Moving the spanned volume to the other server.
    This would involve detaching the volume from the current server, and attaching it on the new server. We've done this on the staging setup, however that setup did not have a spanned volume, and information on moving spanned volumes across vm's is sparse.

  2. Copying everything from the spanned volume to a new, not spanned, volume, and moving that disk to the new server.
    This has the advantage of not having to move the spanned volumes.
    However copying all the data will take a long time, and will mean a long er maintenance window.

The problem:

Our staging environment does not have spanned disks, it has one single volume (1.99TB, as the staging is only 1TB large).
I can't replicate the move with anything of equal size, without spending a lot of time and resources recreating the current setup.

I'm looking for either any kind of documentation that shows that moving a spanned disk from one VM to another will correctly recognize them as being a foreign disk group.
So far I've only found this article.

Or better yet, a cleaner solution for moving the databases across servers.
Would it be safe to replicate this without the 3TB disks, simply with 250GBx3 disks in a spanned volume? Or can I expect additional issues with the larger disks that simply can't be tested without increasing the size over 2TB (the single volume max size).

vmware-esxi

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    It should work, for various values of "should" and "work".

    The basic steps (more detail available in this Technet article):

    • For some reason, it says to uninstall the disks in Device Manager first. That strikes me as odd, but hey it's Microsoft.
    • In Disk Management, right click and "Remove Disk" the drives from the first server.
    • In VMware, detach them and attach them to the new server.
    • Once all the disks are attached and recognized by the new server, right click them and select "Import Foreign Disk".
    • Windows should recognize the span and allow access to it.

    That said, I highly recommend having A) a good backup and B) a fully tested process. Just create a new 5x1GB span or something and give it a shot between the two servers. It should give you an idea of any pitfalls or errors you might see.

    • 1