Background
As mentioned in a previous post, I had a really bad experience with vVols presented from IBM storage. Anyhow, the machines must be migrated to other storage, and reading how vVols work, that’s a scary prospect.
The good thing: Thanks to Veeam, I have excellent backups.
The bad thing: Since they’re dependent on the system’s ability to make snapshots, I only have backups up until my vVols failed. Troubleshooting, identifying the underlying issue, having VMware look at the systems and point at IBM, and finally realizing IBM won’t touch my issue unless I sign a year’s worth of software support agreements took several days, during which I’ve had no new backups for the affected VMs.
Fortunately, most of the systems I had hosted on the failed storage volumes were either more or less static, or stored data on machines on regular LUNs or vSAN.
The Three Trials Methods
Veeam restore
Templates and turned off-machines were marked as Inaccessible in the vCenter console. Since they had definitely seen no changes since the vVol storage broke down, I simply restored them to other datastores from the latest available backup.
VMware Converter
I attempted to use a Standalone VMware Converter to migrate a Ubuntu VM, but for some reason it kept having kernel panics on boot time. I suspect it may have something to do with the fact that Converter demands that the paravirtual SCSI controller is replaced with the emulated LSI one. I have yet to try with a Windows server, but my initial tests made me decide to only use Converter as an extra backup.
Cold migration
This is one method I was surprised worked, and which simplified things a lot. It turns out that – at least with the specific malfunction I experienced – turning off a VM that has been running doesn’t actually make it inaccessible to vCenter. And since a turned off VM doesn’t require the creation of snapshots to allow migration, moving it to accessible storage was a breeze. This is what I ended up doing with most of the machines.
Summary
It turns out that at least for my purposes, the vVols system decided to ”fail safe”, relatively speaking, allowing for cold migration of all machines that had been running when the management layer failed. I had a bit of a scare when the cold migration of a huge server failed due to a corrupt snapshot, but a subsequent retry where I moved the machine to a faster datastore succeeded, meaning I did not have to worry about restoring data from other copies of the machine.