notesguru99 wrote:
Presumably SAN 2 would have different iSCSI fqn's that none of my VM Hosts would have ever seen before. So how would it connect to SAN 2 when there is no vCenter running to initiate the rescan or initial connection? And then after it somehow connects would it present me with with new, but the same, datastores (if that makes sense)? And it would see all of the VM's on the datastores, I would be able to start them, but they would be copies, so in vCenter I would have duplicated VM's?
Hi,
When the storage is replicated and the replication is broken and you present it to the hosts you will need to rescan the iSCSI adapter. You can do this through the commandline however using probably:
esxcli storage core adapter rescan -A vmhba33
Now you probably will want to add the initiator to the host before that:
esxcli iscsi adapter discovery sendtarget add -A vmhba33 -a <ip-address of iSCSI array>
But you could add the iSCSI initiator way before ever running in to this scenario.
Now when your hosts sees the new LUNs you will either need to "mount" these LUNs or "resignature" these. You use "mount" when the connection to the "old SAN" is lost for good, and you resignature when the old connection is still there or you expect it back.
When you mount the LUN you can just simply power on the VMs, heck if you are lucky vSphere HA will do it for you.
When you 'resignature' the LUN you will need to re-register the VMs as well as all the "UUIDs" of the datastores they are on have changed and "ESXi / vCenter" doesn't know where the VMs are.
So not a 1 2 3 straight forward and simple procedure. I would recommend testing this and documenting it!