We're looking to do a P2V on our file servers which are all 2 node A/P SAN connected MS Cluster. I see articles where people are working to convert the cluster nodes themselves and then have the MS Cluster running on ESX – this is not what I'm looking to do.
I have not see any (covered under a brief search) mention of any attempting to do a P2V conversion of the MS Cluster virtual server. Seems like this would be the easiest deal if it worked.
So, I have FS1 as the virtual resource with N1 and N2 as the nodes. Can I run a host P2V of FS1 for a system drive to capture all the shares, then just RDM the SAN LUN to the newly created FS1 VM? Or am I stuck with creating a third node, putting it into the cluster, evicting the original nodes, shutting down cluster services and then renaming or using DNS to point to the FS1 FQDN?
Thanks!
Best Answer
I know it seems like a good idea but any time I've tried P2V'ing MSCS clusters I've ended up regretting it. For file & Print sharing there are few direct negative side effects but for SQL clusters it is very messy. You can't P2V the virtual server name (FS1) directly, you have to break the cluster and migrate the individual nodes. But as I said it's a bad idea in any case.
If these are just file server clusters then the simplest thing to do is just export the shares (they are just a registry key), build a new clean VM, attach the existing data disk as an RDM and import the registry keys. Once your happy that it's working, rename the machine as the old virtual node name.