Hi all,

Imagine the following situation...

- A VMware Datacenter with 3 Clusters of ESX hosts; one of those clusters is setup to host all Oracle VMs.

- A CX4 is in production for the shared storage for the three clusters in this datacenter. One Storage Group is defined. All ESX hosts and all luns are in this single storage group.

I want to separate the storage from the two "normal" ESX clusters and the "Oracle cluster". Of course I want to minimalize the downtime of the guests; if possible I do not want any down-time at all.

As far as I know, I cannot add a host to two storage groups, but I can add a lun to multiple Storage Groups.

This is a scenario I can use. I would like from you if I can be successfull this way, and maybe there is another, maybe better, scenario to do it.

- Place one of the ESX-servers in the "Oracle cluster" in Maintenance mode

- Remove this host from the ESX storage group.

- Create a new Storage group "ESX-Oracle" and connect the ESX host to this newly created storage group.

- Connect all luns to this "ESX-Oracle" storage group with the same IDs as in the ESX storage group.

- Rescan storage for the ESX host and check if all luns are visible.

- Exit maintenance mode and put a second ESX host in maintenance mode.

- Remove the host from the normal ESX storage group and add to the Oracle Storage group.

- perform the last two steps for all hosts in the Oracle cluster.

If finished successfully remove all Oracle luns from the default ESX Storage group.

I hope to hear from you.

Regards,

Bart