VMware vSphere 6 provides some vMotion Enhancements. With vSphere 6.0 vMotion is being expanded to:
- vMotion across vCenter Servers.
- vMotion across virtual switches.
- Long Distance vMotion.
- Replication-Assisted vMotion.
vMotion across vCenter Servers
vSphere 6 introduces support for Cross vCenter vMotion and possibility to change compute, storage, networks, and management between data centers without disruption. The following settings are preserved during vMotion:
- VM historical data such as Alarms and Task History or Events.
- VM UUID.
- HA/DRS settings including Affinity/anti-affinity rules, isolation responses, automation level.
- MAC address of Virtual NIC.
- HA/DRS settings including Affinity/anti-affinity rules, isolation responses, automation level, star-up priority.
Cross vCenter vMotion requirements are as follow:
- L2 network connectivity (the IP of the VM is not changed).
- The same SSO domain for both vCenters if you use the GUI to initiate the vMotion.
- vMotion Network.
vMotion across virtual switches
vSphere 6 provides possibility to perform vMotion between the following VSS or VDS networks:
- from VSS to VSS.
- from VSS to VDS.
- from VDS to VDS.
Long Distance vMotion
Long Distance vMotion provides migration VMs between two sites with vcenters and requires only 250 Mbps network bandwidth per vMotion operation and max 150 ms TTL. As I mentioned earlier, the vMotion process keeps the VMs historical data (events, alarms, performance counters). There are requirements as follow:
- Two vCenters 6 (one at the each site).
- The same SSO domain for both vCenters if you use the GUI to initiate the vMotion.
- L2 connectivity for VM network.
- 250 Mbps network bandwidth per vMotion operation.
Replication-Assisted vMotion
Replication-assisted vMotion enables customers, with active-active replication set up between two sites, to perform a more efficient vMotion resulting in huge time and resource savings. With Replication-assisted vMotion customers can save as much as 95 percent more efficient depending on the size of the data.
Use Cases
vSphere 6 provides a lot of new vMotion features that really changing Disaster Recovery possibilites for VMware environment such as:
- Disaster avoidance.
- Multi-site load balancing.
- Follow the sun.
- Permanent migrations.