here's a doozie...

So our ESXi hosts are booting from SAN. We've got some methods to migrate the LUNs from the old storage to the new, but politically and team silo's make doing this ourselves appealing. It was suggested that we present the boot lun from one host to another, then mount it as an RDM and do a dd from one RDM to another. Intriguing idea, but looks laced with issues in reality. First being, that the client and vCenter see the VMFS volume on it and outright reject allowing it to pass through. I've yet to drop to the CLI to try and do it.

Hopefully someone brilliant like lop will albatross in, swoop down, shit all over our plans, and fly out. Thank you for your service...

The RDMs would work but you have to ssh into the host to create them.

If you have an iSCSI SAN you could connect the boot LUNs you want to copy to some Linux vm and copy them that way. You mentioned "team silos" so you'd need access to the SAN to register the linux vms initiator with the hosts boot LUNs though.

Sorry, didn't say... FC. Thank you... I guess I should have just tried it.