VMWare vMotion

Presented by:
Sanoop Nambiar
Chavi Malhotra
Ahmed Akram
Team# 10

Agenda
What is vMotion Migration?
Key Features
How vMotion Migration works?
Storage vMotion
Cross Host Storage vMotion
Comparison between vMotion and Hyper-V Live
Migration
Demo

What is vMotion Migration?

A vMotion migration moves a powered-on
virtual machine from one host to another.
With vMotion, one can
Improve overall hardware utilization
Allow continued virtual machine operation while
accommodating scheduled hardware downtime.
Proactively migrate virtual machines away from
failing or underperforming servers.

[1]

Key Features
Performance
Unnoticeable downtime to users.

Interoperability
Support for fiber channel SAN, NAS and iSCSI
Enhanced vMotion compatibilty

Manageability
Multiple concurrent migrations
Priority levels
Scheduled migration tasks

[2]

How vMotion Migration

works?
Step 1: Initiate migration when VM is powered
On

[3]

How vMotion Migration

works?
Step 2: Starting the memory copy and adding a
memory bitmap

[3]

How vMotion Migration

works?
Step 3: Quiescing VM1 and transferring memory
bitmap file from source ESXi host to destination
ESXi host.

[3]

How vMotion Migration

works?
Step 4: The actual memory in bitmap is fetched
from the source to the destination.

[3]

How vMotion Migration

works?
Step 5: VM starts on the destination ESXi host
and vCenter Server deletes VM1 from source
ESXi host.

[3]

Virtual Machine
Requirements
The VM must not be connected to any device
physically available to only one ESXi host.
The VM must not be connected to an internalonly virtual switch.
The VM must not have its CPU affinity set to a
specific CPU.
The VM must have all its virtual machine files
stored on a shared datastore accessible from
both the source and the destination ESXi hosts.

[2][3]

Host Requirements
Source and destination hosts must have:
Visibility to all storage (Fibre Channel, iSCSI,
NAS) used by the virtual machine.
At least a Gigabit network.
Access to the same physical networks
Compatible CPUs

[2][3]

Storage vMotion
Storage vMotion migrates a running VM's
virtual disks from one data store to another
data store.

[3]

Cross Host Storage

vMotion
Shared nothing vMotion.
Move workloads from host to host, regardless
of the storage type.
Only requirement is that both hosts must share
the same L2 (layer 2) network.

[3]

Cross Host Storage

vMotion Scenario1
Both hosts use local datastores

[3]

Cross Host Storage

vMotion Scenario2
One host uses local datastore. The other uses
SAN storage.

[3]

Cross Host Storage

vMotion Scenario3
Both hosts use a shared datastores

[3]

Comparison between
vMotion and Hyper-V Live
Migration

Migration Time Comparison

[5]

Disruption Comparison

[6]

Issues faced with Hyper-V

Live migration
Hyper-V server was not able to access the shared
folder for ISO file to create a virtual machine

Issues faced with Hyper-V

Live migration
Performed "netstat -a" on Hyper-V server to
confirm that Hyper-V server was not listening
on any of the well-known ports like 80(HTTP),
443(SSL), 21(FTP), 22(SSH), 23 (Telnet).
To overcome this problem, copied 3GB windows
7 ISO to a TFTP server.
Using command prompt in HyperV Server
2012, I used the FTP utility to get the file from
that TFTP server.
Using the ISO, a virtual machine was created.

Port Issues

Domain Required
A domain was required to enable live migration in
Hyper-V

Complete Architecture of
our demo

References
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YH0he0nz8Mg
[2] http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/VMware-VMotion-DSEN.pdf
[3] Scott Lowe, Nick Marshall, Forbes Guthrie, Matt Liebowitz,
Josh Atwell (2013). Mastering VMware vSphere 5.5
[4] http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vmw-vmotion-verus-livemigration.pdf
[5] http://www.vcritical.com/2011/10/vmware-vmotion-over-5times-faster-than-hyper-v-live-migration/
[6] http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vmw-vmotion-verus-livemigration.pdf

Thank You