Vmware vmotion what is

These include VM Replication and Site Recovery, features that can help you handle the process of data center migration. You can create a replica, i. You can perform live migration of your VMs from one physical host to another, without any downtime. This technology allows the VM processes to keep running throughout the migration process.

Simply for reference, VMware supports cold migration mode, too, which means that migration can be performed when the VM is turned off or suspended. As live migration is performed, the VM retains its current memory content, network identity and connections, and all additional information that defines it. On a gigabit Ethernet network, the process of migration takes less than two seconds, according to VMware documentation.

To reduce the need for manual effort, you can automate and schedule the migration of your VMs. The migration details can be set up via the Migrate Virtual Machine wizard. Depending on your needs, you can schedule the migration process to run either once or multiple times. Additionally, VMware vMotion can help you find an appropriate destination host within seconds, thus eliminating the need to do this manually.

If you are running a large infrastructure that spans across multiple locations or countries, VMware offers functionality for migrating VMs over large distances. Available since the vSphere 6. RTT, or round-trip time, is the length of time required for a signal or data packet to travel from a starting point to its destination and back again.

With VMware vMotion, this is about milliseconds or less. The RTT has been increased by almost 10 times, which means you can easily perform migration of live workloads between datacenters located on different continents.

If you prefer to change the host and the datastore, both the state of the VM and the virtual disk are moved. Migration can be performed between hosts, clusters, or data centers without shared storage. This functionality, officially known as Storage vMotion, allows you to simplify the maintenance and upgrading of your VMs, optimize disks for performance, or convert disk types. It is available in VMware vSphere 5. This is what the virtual network adapter on the guest OS connects to.

And just like any other network, physical or virtual, all of the switches maintain a map of network MAC addresses and what port they are connected to. This causes all of the switches, both physical and virtual to update the mappings so that network traffic will arrive at the new host, rather than the old.

If this gets you thinking there might be some caveats to VMotion, you are right. So now you know how vmotion works! And yes, those VMware engineers are definitely some smart people!

Mike is the founder of The Geek Pub. A jack of all trades who simply enjoys the challenge creating things, whether from wood, metal, or lines of code in a computer. Mike has created all kinds of projects that you can follow and build yourself, from a retro arcade cabinet to plantation shutters for your home. Thanks for the info Mike! This is something I have wanted to know for a while. This is the first explanation of VMotion I can actually understand.

Thanks for writing this Mike! Super cool! Some really smart people figured this out. Way smarter than me! How VMotion Works! Discover Metrics and Logs. Subscribe to Our Newsletter. Get the latest product updates, company news, and special offers delivered right to your inbox.

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