vSphere 6: vMotion enhancements

With vSphere 6.0 you can migrate Virtual Machines across virtual switches. The new vMotion workflow allows you to choose the destination network which can be on a vSwitch or vDS. This feature eliminates the need to span virtual switches across two locations.

 

VMware vSphere vMotion capabilities have been enhanced on Vsphere 6, enabling users to perform live migration of virtual machines across virtual switches, across vCenter Server systems, and across long distances of up to 100ms RTT.

 

vSphere administrators now can migrate across vCenter Server systems, enabling migration from a Windows version of vCenter Server to vCenter Server Appliance or vice versa, depending on specific requirements. Previously, this was a difficult task and caused a disruption to virtual machine management. This can now be accomplished seamlessly without losing historical data about the virtual machine.

 

Cross vSwitch vMotion

 

Cross vSwitch vMotion allows you to seamless migrate a virtual machines across different virtual switches while performing a vMotion. This means that you are now longer restricted by the network you created on the vSwitches in order to vMotion a virtual machine.

 

vMotion will work across a mix of switches (standard and distributed). Previously, you could only vMotion from vSS to vSS or within a single vDS. This limitation has been removed.

 

The following Cross vSwitch vMotion migrations are possible:

• vSS to vSS migration.
• vSS to vDS migration.
• vDS to vDS migration (transferring VDS port metadata)
• vDS to VSS is not allowed.

Cross vCenter vMotion

But Cross vSwitch vMotion is not the only vMotion enhancement. vSphere 6 also introduces support for Cross vCenter vMotion. vMotion can now perform the following changes simultaneously.

 

• Change compute (vMotion) – Performs the migration of virtual machines across compute hosts.
• Change storage (Storage vMotion) – Performs the migration of the virtual machine disks across datastores.
• Change network (Cross vSwitch vMotion) – Performs the migration of a VM across different virtual switches.
• Change vCenter (Cross vCenter vMotion) – Performs the migration of the vCenter which manages the VM.

 

All of these types of vMotion are seamless to the guest OS.

 

Like with vSwitch vMotion, Cross vCenter vMotion requires L2 network connectivity since the IP of the VM will not be changed. This functionality builds upon Enhanced vMotion and shared storage is not required. Target support for local (single site), metro (multiple well-connected sites), and cross-continental sites

With vSphere 6 vMotion you can now:

Migrate from a VCSA to a Windows version of vCenter & vice versa.

• Replace/retire vCenter server without distruption.
• Resource pooling across vCenters where additional vCenters were used due to vCenter scalability limits.
• Migrate VMs across local, metro, and continental distances.
• Public/Private cloud environments with several vCenters.

There are several requirements for Cross vCenter vMotion to work:

• Only vCenter 6.0 and greater will be supported. All instances of vCenter prior to version 6.0 will need to be upgraded before this this feature will work. For example, an instance of vCenter 5.5 and 6.0 will not work.
• Both the source and the destination vCenter servers will need to be joined to the same SSO domain if you want to perform the vMotion using the vSphere Web Client. If the vCenter servers are joined to different SSO domains, it’s still possible to perform a Cross vCenter vMotion, but you must use the API.
• You will need at least 250 Mbps of available network bandwidth per vMotion operation.
• Lastly, although not technically required for the vMotion to successfully complete, L2 connectivity is required on the source and destination portgroups. When a Cross vCenter vMotion is performed, a Cross vSwitch vMotion is done as well. The virtual machine portgroups for the VM will need the share an L2 network because the IP will within the guest OS will not be updated.