I want to migrate my Nexenta iscsi SAN to FreeNas with NFS using two servers running at the same time.
The data on the ISCSI Luns are only ESX Virtual Machines..
From the ESX Host, I already have access to the Nexenta ISCSI Luns.
I can create the NFS shared on the FreeNas Box and them mount them on ESX.
If I just do the CP all Vm's get converted to a thick copy of the VM.
If I use this script I can copy the ESX files as a thin copy of the VM.
http://serverfault.com/questions/311459/how-to-backup-virtual-machines-on-a-standalone-esxi-host
The script uses vmkfstools that understands the esx format and can copy a thin formatted file.
The downsides to this approach are:
Anyone have a better way?
The data on the ISCSI Luns are only ESX Virtual Machines..
From the ESX Host, I already have access to the Nexenta ISCSI Luns.
I can create the NFS shared on the FreeNas Box and them mount them on ESX.
If I just do the CP all Vm's get converted to a thick copy of the VM.
If I use this script I can copy the ESX files as a thin copy of the VM.
http://serverfault.com/questions/311459/how-to-backup-virtual-machines-on-a-standalone-esxi-host
The script uses vmkfstools that understands the esx format and can copy a thin formatted file.
The downsides to this approach are:
- Minor issue: The files travel over the network twice. Once from Nexenta to ESX and then to FreeNAS.
- All ZFS SnapShots are lost
- If the ESX VM has files on Luns's, the script does not work.
Anyone have a better way?