We’ve all come to love vMotion. Who hear hasn’t used it and had that warm fuzzy feeling when the VM suddenly appears on another host and you want to yell out “Hey! Check that out!” Yes, there are some other ‘similar’ technologies now available today but none as easy or reliable in my opinion.
So how can vMotion be made better? Well there have always been some minor limitations:
- Only two simultaneous vMotions were supported (though some people figured out how ot make an unsupported change).
- Some pathological workloads didn’t vMotion very well, or at all sometimes (large VM’s with large memory configurations).
- Despite throwing more bandwidth at the vMotion network, it never seemed to use it, especially 10GbE which is a common infrastructure today.
Enter Scalable vMotion
- One can now perform up to 8 simultaneous vMotions and they’re fast.
- 10GbE network testing shows utilization up to 8Gb/sec (increased 3x from 2.6Gb/sec).
- Significantly reduced stun times (the time a VM is frozen while executing is started on the target host).
This was accomplished through:
- Restructuring how vMotion used the network.
- Optimized VM memory handling.
- Optimized vMotion convergence logic.
- A new feature “quick resume.”
I think you’ll be very happy with the performance of vMotion and this scalability only helps promote 100% virtualization in datacenters. Next vMotion stop – the cloud!
