rebuilding starwind SAN

[paulow1978]

Hi,

I am going through the process of coming up with a plan to move my starwind server over to RAID50 from RAID10 and unfortunately my RAID card wont allow me to do this on the fly so I am going to have to reinstall windows and Starwind (I am on version 5..

I have 4ximg files (all quite big) and I am going to have to copy those off the windows box after unmounting the datastores from my ESXi servers.

I was wondering what the best way to do this is as I don't know if the unique ID in ESXi for that LUn will be unknown when I rebuild starwind.

Also I was wondering if could just install the latest version of starwind and copy the img files back or do I need to upgrade starwind first (which will update the img files) then do my raid50 rebuild?

many thanks!

Paul

[paulow1978]

that should be starwind version 5.eight (but it put a smiley in instead of the eight!)

[Anatoly (staff)]

Hi!

First of all I think it is really good idea for you to update your SAN as #1 step.

As about your migration question, just to be sure that we are on the same page - can you confirm that you are running only HA devices?

[paulow1978]

Hi,

thanks for the reply. Yes, i think upgrading would be a good idea too

I am not using Starwind in an HA configuration. It is just one physical box at the moment. I just need to basically move all the img files off the server, wipe it and rebuild the server from scratch then copy the img files back over.

thanks,

Paul

[Anatoly (staff)]

I think the most correct way will be as follows:
1.Shut down all the applications, VMs and programs that were using SAN datastores;
2.Install the latest build over the existing one;
3.Delete the targets and devices from inventory (do not delete virtual disk files)
4.Move your virtual disks to the RAID that you want to use;
5.Create the targets basing on the VD files.

I hope that helped.

[jeddyatcc]

The only thing that I will add, is that when you recreate the devices, make sure to point them at the files that you copied back, not to create new ones. I know that this is obvious, but just in case. Can you let me know if the disk GUIDs changed? I'm going to have to do this soon as well and want to make sure that Hyper-V won't get mad because they changed. I don't think they do, but just want to make sure.

[Anatoly (staff)]

Good point, jeddyatcc.

paulow1978, any update on this? everything passed successfully?