Veritas has qualified migration of storage that is used by Storage Foundation from the physical environment to IBM VIO environment.

Storage Foundation provides the PDC (Portable Data Container) feature, which enables migrating storage from other platforms (Solaris, HP-UX, or Linux) to AIX VIO environment. You can also use PDC feature to migrate the storage consumed by a AIX physical server to a AIX VIO environment. NPIV helps you migrate the applications along with storage from a AIX physical environment to AIX VIO environment and vice-versa.

When storage is consumed by SF, Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM) initializes the storage LUNs as CDS (Cross-platform Data Sharing) type disks by default. A CDS disk group can be imported in a VIO client which has access to LUN's that are mapped through VFC Adapter on the client.

As part of the migration qualification, an application's storage is migrated from physical server to VIO environment (VIO client 1) which has NPIV capable FC adapter connected to it. This allows the application to access the storage in VIO client 1. With NPIV capable FC adapter at VIOS, the devices presented to the VIO client would appear as regular AIX hdisk devices. Figure: SF migration from a physical environment to AIX VIO environment shows this migration.

Migration is an offline task.