[Deploy and Upgrade Nutanix Unified Storage] An administrator is tasked with migrating physical SQL workloads from a legacy SAN platform to a…

The most appropriate action is to use Nutanix Move to perform a Physical-to-Virtual (P2V) migration. Nutanix Move is a purpose-built appliance that simplifies migrating workloads from various sources, including physical servers, to the Nutanix platform (AHV). It handles the entire process of data replication, OS driver injection, and conversion of the physical server, including its boot-from-SAN configuration, into a virtual machine. This approach migrates the entire workload with minimal downtime and without requiring a rebuild of the server or applications, making it the most efficient and direct method.

B. Present a Nutanix Volumes iSCSI LUN to the physical host: This only replaces the storage backend. The workload remains on the legacy physical hardware and is not migrated to the Nutanix environment.

C. Rebuild the SQL server as a new VM on Nutanix: This is a valid but more labor-intensive migration strategy. It is not a direct migration of the existing workload as requested, but rather a new deployment.

D. Use Nutanix Files to host the SQL database files: Nutanix Files (SMB/NFS) is not the recommended storage protocol for active SQL Server database files (MDF/LDF) due to performance and latency considerations.

1. Nutanix Move 4.1 User Guide. (2023). Migration Types section. Explicitly lists "Physical (Windows and Linux) servers to AHV" as a supported migration source and target.

2. Nutanix. (2023). SQL Server on Nutanix Best Practices Guide. Section: Migration Options. Recommends Nutanix Move as the primary tool for P2V migrations of existing SQL Server instances to Nutanix AHV.