[rixxx]

Basically, I've been checking out ESX 3.5 on a Dell PowerEdge 2950 III with 2*4 core Xeon 5405's and 8 gigs of ram. I got about 5 vm's in there doing various things, watching load and evaluating user experience.

I'd like to make this a production server, as the 5 VM's have been running for the last month without a single hitch (I got a XP vm, a 1TB Server 2003 vm, another Server 2003 vm pushing SQL server 2005 & Search Server 2008 with 4 vCPU's, a Server 2008 TS Gateway, and a CentOS 5.2 vm).

After reading about the differences in ESX vs ESXi, I've decided to go with ESXi.

Now, if I reinstall the OS, can I just import the existing VM's, as they're on a different raid container? The OS is currently on a 2*160GB mirror, and the VM's are on a 4*750GB raid 5 (just over 2TB of space).

Or am I going to have to copy the vhd's off the host, reinstall, and copy and import the vhd's?

thanks!

[jasonboche]

It is a well known fact that ESX will "nuke" any fiber attached shared storage that it sees during the installation process.

If the VMs are important to you, you should have backups. But maybe the easiest way to get around this without going through the backup process is to simply disconnect the 4*750GB RAID5 drives so that ESXi cannot see/touch them during the install.

[rixxx]

it's all local storage ... with hot swap drives ... dunno why I never thought to simply unplug the drives ... doh!

ok, so "in theory" I should be able to unplug the 4 drives, install ESXi 3.5 U2 on the mirror, shutdown, plug in the 4 drives, and reboot ... ESXi should detect the volume, and it's contents?

I do have backups, I'd just rather not resort to them .... even at gigabit speeds ... that's still some downtime transfering the vhd's :P

thanks for the idea!

[jasonboche]

Yep, unplug, install, plug them back in. ESX will adopt the new VMFS volumes it should be able to see at that piont but in the odd chance it doesn't, go to the storage area of your server configuration in the Virtual Infrastructure Client and "refresh". It should pick them back up.

Jas