From the course: VMware vSphere 6.5 Essential Training
vMotion - vSphere Tutorial
From the course: VMware vSphere 6.5 Essential Training
vMotion
- [Instructor] In this video, I'll explain the basic concepts of vMotion and how it can be used to take a running virtual machine and move it from one ESXi host to another. And that's the purpose of vMotion. We have virtual machines that are running on one ESXi host, and maybe we need to do some sort of physical maintenance on that host, like add more memory, or maybe we need to load balance. For example, maybe one of our ESXi hosts is very heavily utilized and we want to take some running virtual machines and move 'em off that heavily utilized host to a host that has less virtual machines on it. That's what we use vMotion for, is to take a running VM, move it from one physical ESXi host to another with no service outage. So let's take a look at how vMotion works. And in this example, we see a virtual machine in purple running on ESXi Host 1. And this is where the live state of our virtual machine is running. So maybe we need to take down Host 1 for a memory upgrade and we want to move our virtual machine to another host using vMotion. This virtual machine also has a set of files that we see on the right-hand side on our data store. And so if we're going to take this virtual machine and move it to a different ESXi host it must still be able to access those files. We cannot have our virtual machine losing access to its files because one of those files is a VMDK and that VMDK is my virtual machine's C drive, right? Or one of its virtual disks. So it's imperative that if a VM is going to move from one host to another, that it is still able to access all of its files on the data store. And so to do that, we're going to need what's called shared storage. And when you hear that term shared storage, just think of it this way, shared storage is a data store that is accessible across multiple ESXi hosts, right? So we've got this data store that's available on multiple hosts. And so if my VM moves from Host 1 to Host 2, it's still going to be able to access all of its files. So, here we see my virtual machine has just moved from Host 1 to Host 2. It still has access to its data store because the data store is shared storage and is accessible across multiple hosts. And notice on the left-hand side, the virtual machine is connected to a virtual switch, and those virtual switches are also identically configured so that my VM does not lose access to the network when it moves, right? The IP address of the virtual machine does not change. So that address still needs to provide connectivity when that VM moves to another host. Okay, so let's take a look at an example of what actually happens when we carry out a vMotion. So again, my VM is running on Host ESXi 01, and we've configured something called a VMkernel port for vMotion, right? The point of a VMkernel port is to handle special traffic, right? It's not for virtual machine traffic, it's for other stuff. So the VMkernel port in this case is marked for vMotion traffic. And what it's going to do is facilitate a creation of a copy of that virtual machine on the destination host, right? So let's rewind here. My virtual machine is running on ESXi Host 1 right now, right? It's got stuff running in memory. It's accessing a virtual network interface. It's accessing storage. We need to copy the state of that VM to the destination host, and that's the point of the vMotion VMkernel port. And once that copy is complete, now I've got an exact duplicate of that VM running on the destination host. And so what will happen then is any final changes, anything that changed during the vMotion will also be copied over. And the VM on Host 1 will be halted and the VM on Host 2 will take over. And now we've successfully vMotion the virtual machine from Host 1 to Host 2. And like I said, there's no outage associated with this. We do need to have vCenter in place. And you may notice a slight bump in latency while this vMotion occurs, but again, there's no noticeable outage. So vMotion is used to take a running virtual machine and move it from one host to another. This is not the only type of vMotion. With vSphere 6, we can actually take a virtual machine that's running on a host, managed by one vCenter instance and move it to a host managed by another vCenter instance, right? So prior to vSphere 6, this was not possible. Now we can use Cross vCenter vMotion to move a running VM from one host managed by one vCenter server to another host managed by a different vCenter server. Another change in vSphere 6 is the fact that long-distance vMotion is now supported over connections with up to 150 milliseconds of latency. We have this ability to take a virtual machine that's running, vMotion IT with no service interruption across a long geographic distance, as long as that physical connection does not have more than 150 milliseconds of latency. We can even migrate virtual machines from one virtual switch to another using cross-network vMotion. And so in this lesson, we learned how vMotion can be used to take a running VM, move it from one host to another, and how we need a vMotion VMkernel port in order to copy the required information. vSphere 6 introduced a number of new vMotion features, like cross-vCenter vMotion, cross-virtual Switch vMotion, and long-distance vMotion, with networks up to 150 milliseconds of latency.
Contents
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Introduction40s
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vMotion6m 45s
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Demo: Configuring for vMotion6m 51s
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Demo: vMotion6m 29s
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Demo: Scheduled vMotion2m 9s
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Storage vMotion7m 39s
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Demo: Storage vMotion4m 13s
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High Availability (HA) introduction8m 14s
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Admission control6m 19s
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vSphere 6.5: What's new in HA10m 50s
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Demo: HA9m
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Demo: Proactive HA4m 53s
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