Do VNXe1600 systems support a mix of fabric and directly attached hosts at the same time ?

Hello Community and good day,

please consider a production environment comprised of a Dell EMC VNXe1600 Dual SP box with Fibre Channel front-end ports and 3x direct connect servers running VMware ESXi, each of which has only 1x Dual-port HBA currently connected to the SPs of the VNXe1600.

We will soon need to migrate all VMs from the VNXe1600 to a new Fibre Channel storage system. I am trying to figure out the best way to migrate VMs with no downtime to the new storage system in order to be able to decommission the VNXe1600. Unfortunately we do not have the possibility to connect the ESXi hosts to both the old and the new storage systems simultaneously as all HBA host ports are currently connected to the back of the VNXe1600.

We do have a couple of Fibre Channel switches that can help in this scenario and honestly I don't really see other solutions here.

My question is: do VNXe1600 systems support a mix of fabric attached and direct connect host connections at the same time as a temporary solution ? If yes, we will be able to:

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- place one ESXi host at a time in maintenance mode
- unplug its HBAs from the back of the VNXe1600
- plug the HBAs on each helper Fibre Channel switch
- resume the ESXi host
- repeat with the other hosts
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Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks and Regards,

M.