vSphere 8 vMotion Improvements

September 20, 2022September 20, 2022 Leave a comment 3

vSphere 8 was announced at VMware Explore 2022 in San Francisco. Part of this new major release are vMotion updates. vMotion is extensively developed to support new workloads and is one of the key enablers for VMware’s multi-cloud approach. Whenever a workload is live-migrated between vSphere and/or VMware Cloud infrastructures, vMotion logic is involved.

vMotion In-App Notifications

With the release of vSphere 7, the vMotion logic was updated to greatly reduce the performance impact on applications during live migrations. Significant work was done to minimize the stun-time, aka the switch-over time, where the last memory pages and checkpoint info are transferred from source to destination. (more…)

vMotion Deep Dive Series

November 12, 2019September 21, 2022 1 Comment 16

In my latest blog posts we discussed the vSphere vMotion process in detail. Those blog posts are now accompanied by light board videos (including subtitles/closed captions!). Be sure to check this vMotion Deep Dive Series:

Part 1: Introduction to the vMotion process

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How to Tune vMotion for Lower Migration Times?

September 6, 2019September 6, 2022 Leave a comment 1

In an earlier blog post, The vMotion Process Under the Hood, we went over the vMotion process internals. Now that we understand how vMotion works, lets go over some of the options we have today to lower migration times even further. When enabled, by default, vMotion works beautifully. However, with high bandwidth networks quickly becoming mainstream, what can we do to fully take advantage of 25, 40 or even 100GbE NICs? This blog post goes into details on vMotion tunables and how they can help to optimize the process.

Streams and Threads

To understand how we can tune vMotion performance and thereby lower live-migration times, we first need to understand the concept of vMotion streams. (more…)

My VMworld 2019

August 1, 2019September 6, 2022 Leave a comment Like

VMworld 2019 will mark my first edition as a VMware employee. Thus, I will be working more and have less time to attend sessions myself. However, there are always things to look forward to! As many know, it’s not only about the break-out sessions. I love visiting the Solution Expo and the bloggers area and most of all; meeting old and new friends!

Come meet me at the Meet-the-Expert tables, at the TAM customer day or during one of my break-out sessions. I will be presenting the following sessions:

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The vMotion Process Under the Hood

August 1, 2019September 21, 2022 Leave a comment 3

The VMware vSphere vMotion feature is one of the most important capabilities in today’s virtual infrastructures. Since its inception in 2002 and the release in 2003, it allows us to migrate the active state of a virtual machines from one physical ESXi host to another. Today, the ability to seamlessly migrate virtual machines is an integral part of nearly every virtualization deployment. The portability of workloads is the foundation for true hybrid cloud experience by being able to move them between on-premises and public clouds using VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX). vSphere vMotion still is and always will be one of the most momentous game-changers in the IT industry.

A lot has been developed on the vMotion internals over the years to support new technologies.

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Exploring the GPU Architecture

March 12, 2019September 21, 2022 8 Comments 22

A Graphics Processor Unit (GPU) is mostly known for the hardware device used when running applications that weigh heavy on graphics, i.e. 3D modeling software or VDI infrastructures. In the consumer market, a GPU is mostly used to accelerate gaming graphics. Today, GPGPU’s (General Purpose GPU) are the choice of hardware to accelerate computational workloads in modern High Performance Computing (HPC) landscapes.

HPC in itself is the platform serving workloads like Machine Learning (ML), Deep Learning (DL), and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Using a GPGPU is not only about ML computations that require image recognition anymore. Calculations on tabular data is also a common exercise in i.e. healthcare, insurance and financial industry verticals. But why do we need a GPU for these types of all these workloads? This blogpost will go into the GPU architecture and why they are a good fit for HPC workloads running on vSphere ESXi.

Latency vs Throughput

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