- Is this really so advisable the way it is projected?
Yeah, sounds good, you're running on a very old version of ESXi, so presumably there environment is running on fully-supported infrastructure - the only complex bit is making sure their networking is designed to support your current workloads.
- Netapp Storage does support cloud. So technically it should be
possible to migrate the data. What is the best strategy for this? Do
we require additional licenses?
Not quite sure what you mean by 'does support cloud' - but anyway...if you can afford the downtime then just shutdown your VMs where they are - copy them to some form of portable storage, get the storage to the new place, copy them onto the new infrastructure, start them up, make and required changes (IP/DN/NTP/DNS etc.), profit. Of course this then gives you the ability to just failback to the original setup by restarting the current VMs.
- Netapp Storage is all about data plus its configuration (Snapshot,
User Quota Policies, Export Rules etc.). When we talk about storage
space in cloud, then how are we going to control/administrate the
configuration parts listed above? Or will this not be anymore possible
to administrate on our own? And the Cloud administrators take Full
control in their hands and we have to be dependent on them for every
configuration changes? This is very important factor.
I'm really not sure what you're getting at here, the new place's staff will manage the storage, it'll be invisible to you.
- Will VMs running on Netapp Storage be migrated without much efforts?
Is there any documented method for this?
You'll need to plan, mostly around those things I've mentioned above, but yeah it can work, so long as you do that - also of use is the concept of creating a testing VM on the new infrastructure - just a plain VM that you can make roughly behave like the ones you're moving over to test things like connectivity. It'd help build confidence and can be removed once you move your actual Production VMs over.
