Changing the IP of your NFS Datastore

0 Comments ESX 3.5 Tips, ESXi 3.5 Tips, NetApp, Storage, VMware

I’ve ran into some issues today trying to change the IP address of my NFS Datastore. Our filer has a nice 10GbE interface that I’m not using, so my thought was to put my hosts into Maintenance Mode one at a time, remove the old datastore and connect the new one…which is essentially the same exact mount but going over a different interface. Boy was I wrong…

VMotion uses the datastore location path, not the datastore name to do it’s migrations. Basically VC thought this was a completly new datastore, even appended (1) after it. I verified this by looking at the datastores inventory and noticed they listed both, even showed that they were different paths;

datastore = netfs://0.0.0.0//vol/vol1/vm1

datastore (1) = netfs://1.1.1.1//vol/vol1/vm1

So, it looks like I’ll be forced to do a SVMotion on all my data to be able to use this new 10GbE interface.

I also have a ticket open with VMware, just to make sure. I’ll let you know if I find out different.

Update — Well if you’re looking to avoid any downtime you will be forced to use SVMotion to migrate your data to a new datastore. There are some tricks you can use depending on your storage vendor, for example with NetApp you can use flexclones then write a script to unregister and re-register your VMX files. For me, I just took a long weekend and moved everything over. I must tell you that SVMotion for NFS is NOT supported (yet), but we all know it works :)