vMotion Enhancements for vSphere 6.0

vMotion Enhancements for vSphere 6.0

vMotion across vCenter Servers (VCs)

vMotion across virtual switches: Virtual Standard Switch (VSS), Virtual Distributed Switches (VDSs)

vMotion using routed vMotion networks

Long-distance vMotion for use cases such as:

• Permanent migrations (often for Datacenter expansions, acquisitions, consolidations)
• Disaster avoidance
• SRM and disaster avoidance testing
• Multi-site capacity utilization
• Follow-the-sun scenarios
• Onboarding onto vSphere-based public clouds (including VMware vCloud Air)

vMotion Across Virtual Switches

You’re no longer restricted by the network created with the switch. vMotion across virtual switches (standard or VDS). It transfers all the metadata from the VDS ports (portgroups etc) with the VM during the vMotion process. Its transparent to the VMs (VMs are not aware that they are moved) – no downtime for applications.

Requirements:

• L2 VM network connectivity

It’s possible to move VMs:

• from VSS to VSS
• from VSS to VDS
• from VDS to VDS

vMotion Across vCenters

Allows to change compute, storage, networks and management. In single operation you’re able to move a VM from vCenter 1 where this VM is placed on certain Host, lays on some datastore and is present in some resource pool, into a vCenter 2 where the VM lays on different datastore, is on different host and it’s part of different resource
As a vSphere engineer, we’re usually limited to vMotion domains that are limited by a vCenter Server construct (or more specifically, the data center in many cases due to network configurations). vSphere 6 will allow VMs to vMotion across Datacenter and VC boundaries using a new workflow. You’ll also be able to take advantage of a workflow that lets you hop from one network (source) to another network (destination), eliminating the need to have a single vSwitch construct spanning the two locations.

Long-Distance vMotion

This type of vMotion can move VMs from your datacenter into a cloud datacenter. This makes me thin when to use this kind of vMotion and why?

vMotion using routed networks

The v6.0 of vSphere will allow using routed networks for vMotion networks, which is curently impossible.
When use Long-distance vMotion?
Some of the use cases would be…

• Disaster Avoidance
• Permanent Migrations
• SRM/DA testing
• Multi-site Load balancing

Routed vMotion and Increased RTT Tolerance

And while you can request a RFQ (request for qualification) to use Layer 3 for vMotion, most of us are limited (or comfortable) with Layer 2 vMotion domains. Essentially, this means one large subnet and VLAN stretched between compute nodes for migrating workloads. An upcoming feature will allow VMs to vMotion using routed vMotion networks without need for special qualification. In addition, another useful feature planned will revolve around the ability to vMotion or clone powered off VMs over NFC networks.
And finally, the latency requirements for vMotion are being increased by 10x. Enterprise Plus customers today can tolerate vMotion RTTs (round trip times) of 10 ms or less. In the new release, vMotion can withstand 100 ms of RTT