This session recapped how vMotion currently works, enhancements in vSphere 5.1, and a “future” version. The biggest news for vSphere 5.1 is Unified vMotion, which requires no shared storage. Now on-par with Hyper-V 3.0. Future vMotion capabilities are very cool….in short, live vMotion any VM anywhere around the globe. Session summary:
- vMotion is deployed in 80% of environments
- 5.5 vMotion operations occur every second around the world
- vMotion uses iterative memory pre-copy – Copy rate must exceed page dirtying rate
- Storage vMotion uses 64MB copy regions
- Unified vMotion – New to vSphere 5.1
- Entire VM state (storage and memory) is migrated without shared storage
- Performance of Unified vMotion
- Same disk migration time for storage vMotion and Unified vMotion
- Higher total migration time for Unified vMotion due to memory copy process (very minimal increase)
- Multi-NIC feature is useful for large VMs
- Performance in metro scenarios (.5ms 5ms and 10ms) is the same, as it uses the same metro vMotion code path optimizations as vMotion
- Best Practices
- Upgrade to latest VMFS file system if you aren’t using 1MB blocks
- Use multiple NICs for vMotion
- Same subnet for all IPs
- Configure each vmknic to use a different vmnic
- Provision at least 1Gbps management network when migrating VM with snapshots
- When the source host has access to destination datastore it can use VAAI offload
- Future vMotion capabilities
- Cross-vCenter vMotion – Enable long-distance vMotion architectures
- Simultaneously change compute, storage, networks and vCenter
- Requires L2 connectivity between vDS portgroups using same VLAN, VXLAN, or third party L2 extensions
- UUID is tracked and kept for the life ofthe VM
- Events, alarms, task and stats history preserved across datacenters
- HA and DRS are supported, including admission control
- vCenters must belong to the same SSO domain, metro distances only
- Cross-VDC (virtual datacenters) vMotion
- Live migration of vApps across local VDC boundaries
- Operation initiated by admins and tenants
- Long-distance vMotion
- Support geo distances
- Disaster avoidance
- Requires secure VM migration channel, L2 connectivity, global site load balancer and NAT servers, unified vMotion, cross-center vMotion.
- Supports three architectures – Unified vMotion with share nothing; Utilize active-passive storage replication using virtual-volumes; Utilize active-active asynchronous storage plus virtual volumes
- vMotion anywhere (private to private, private to public, public to public) clouds
