Re: [Xen-users] Migration form Xensource to XenExpress and FC / iSCSI trouble

[Ivan Porro <pivan@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear all,

I don't know if my question was out of topic for the list, or presented 
in a wrong way. If yes, please let me known.
I can imagine that the latter part of the mail (HP vs Dell vs IBM SAN) 
could be not politically correct, and thus not answered at all, but the 
former one (Fibre Channel vs iSCSI and xensource to xenexpress 
migration) may be of some interest and at least for the 
xensource/xenexpress part it seems to me it has not been answered yet in 
the list.
thank you in advance, any hint is appreciated. Should I split my mail in 
three different mail?
        ivan

Ivan Porro wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> after 1 year testing with xensource and three servers (8 VMs, all linux) 
> at a small university laboratory I'm evaluating to migrate to the 
> commercial version of the product with support, and build a SAN which 
> will host our VMs.
> I'have just few questions.... :-)
>
> The FAQs says clearly that "there are no automated tools to migrate 
> XenSource VMs to XenExpress/Server/Enterprise".
> Is there any "unofficial" procedure to do that manually? (i.e. create a 
> VM with the console and then dd the old VM img file to the newly created 
> LVdisk) ?  The main problem is that most VMs are RHEL 3 (unless they're 
> running 2.6.6-xen smoothly).
> Even do we actually have small VMs with no production stress of I/O and 
> network on them, I want to design the SAN smartly. I'm considering iSCSI 
> only for budget issues. I plan to have 2-3 Xen host with a total of 
> 10-15 VMs.
> Is this possible with iSCSI?
> Are out there real world cases I may compare with?
> In other way, should I go for fibre channel anyway or how can I evaluate 
> the trade-off between the two solutions?
> I decided for a SAN also to facilitate backup of my VMs so the idea is 
> to have no or really small disks on the Xen host. Is this good in your 
> experience or should I have anyway my VMs on LVM on Xen host disks?
> Maybe the latter depend on choosing between iSCSI and fibre channel?
>
> I don't want to start a flame on that but I'm also in trouble deciding 
> between Dell, IBM and HP (I've one or two HP DL380G3 that I will recycle 
> in the infrastructure)... any suggestion or real world experience will 
> be appreciated.
> Thank you in advance.
>
>     Ivan
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