DavidRing.ie

The following provides guidance in a scenario where your ESXi host boots from SAN, for example this is the standard configuration for Cisco UCS blades included in a Vblock/VxBlock. These boot volumes will most likely have been created outside of ViPR Controller, thus it will be a requirement to perform an ingestion of these volumes prior to performing any host migration procedures, for example moving a UCS ESXi blade to another cluster in vCenter.

Note: by not performing the ingestion will result in the removal of the Boot volume from the ESXi host masking if you are initiating the migration process utilizing ViPR commands (more on this later).

Note: To avoid ViPR provisioning issues ensure the ESXi BOOT volume masking views have _NO_VIPR appended to their exclusive mask name, this will prevent ViPR from using the exclusive export mask when adding A NEW ESXi host to a cluster:

BootVolumeMaskingViewName_NO_VIPR

The following steps detail how to bring the ESXi boot volumes under ViPR control:

1. Before attempting to import the boot LUN ensure a ViPR virtual pool has been created which meets the Boot LUN requirements for Auto-tiering and thin/thick LUN values. (Please refer to DellEMC KB497018 more detail)

2. From the ViPR catalog perform a discovery of any unmanaged volumes: Login to ViPR UI as ‘root’, navigate to ‘Catalog -> Block Storage Services -> Discover Unmanaged Volumes’ choose the correct storage system name and click ‘Order’.

3. On completion of the discovery chose the catalog item ‘Ingest Exported Unmanaged Volumes’.

4. Select ‘Exclusive’ in order to create a dedicated Export group for the specified ESXi host and chose the associated boot volume.

5. The figure below displays the newly created Export group which hosts the ESXi host Boot LUN. It is now possible to perform the ESXi host migration process for the specified cluster ‘Export Group’, leaving the Boot LUN masking configuration intact.