As a result of the huge success of EMC's VNX platform, the need for data migrations has grown for us, especially recently, to get customer's data safely and easily moved over from their previous storage platform to their shiny new VNX.  Here are some ideas on migration strategies that hopefully help you in the planning or execution of data migrations!

First and foremost, the BEST and EASIEST data migration of all can be done without any downtime, and with nearly zero risk to the data itself. This is accomplished by using Storage vMotion (svMotion), and requires that your data exists in a VMDK format (meaning it's a virtual machine and NOT an RDM), and you are presenting some portion of the VNX to your VMware environment.

Second, when migrating over your file server(s) or file server(s) data, consider skipping the "copy to a LUN" or svMotion methods, and move straight to using the CIFS server capabilities of the VNX. This is a larger conversation, but in brief, the VNX can operate as a Windows file server, where you give it some disk space to use, a name and IP address, and join it to the domain. It will appear as a regular computer in Active Directory (you can create multiples if you'd like as well-- for security or isolation between departments, companies, domains etc.).

The benefits of this are numerous, and include:
<ul>
	<li>FILE DE-DUPLICATION! This is likely the BEST reason to move your file server data to the VNX-- and we regularly</li>
	<li>No single point of failure (which the GUEST OS would normally be unless you cluster your file servers)</li>
	<li>High performance hardware designed to server files!</li>
</ul>
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