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

(more…)

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.

(more…)

vSphere 6: vMotion enhancements

February 2, 2015December 30, 2019 7 Comments 3

Don’t we all remember when we witnessed our first vMotion and realized which awesome things this made possible in virtualization?! In vSphere 6 vMotion even got better!

vMotion version history

First I’d like to give a short overview about what was already achieved in previous versions of vSphere.

vSphere 5.0:

Multi-NIC vMotion
Migration time reduced by making Multi-NIC vMotion possible.
Stun During Page Send
Stunned source machine if needed to progress pre-copy phase of vMotion, so the memory modification rate stays below the precopy transfer rate and the pre-copy will eventually succeed.

vSphere 5.1

vMotion without shared storage
Allows for moving the VM simultaneously to another computing & storage resource at the same time.

(more…)

vSphere 6: New features!

February 2, 2015December 30, 2019 3 Comments 2

Updated: As of today (12th of March 2015) vSphere 6 is downloadable! Login to the VMware portal in order to download the following newly released products:

vSphere 6
vSOM 6
vCloud Suite 6
SRM 6
VSAN 6
VMware Integrated OpenStack 1.0

Hear, hear!!! VMware vSphere 6 is here! 🙂

After a period of extensive testing, including a ‘public’ beta test, VMware vSphere 6 is launched today (February the 2nd)!!!

It’s been a while since the last major version release as listed in the table below. vSphere 6 should provide the next step of innovation in server virtualization.

Version	Release date
vSphere 6	12 march 2015
vSphere 5.5	22 sep 2013
vSphere 5.1	10 sep 2012
vSphere 5.0	24 aug 2011
vSphere 4.1	13 jul 2010

New features

Check all the new features listed (as found on the VMware website) below:

(more…)