Writing

One Simultaneous Live Migration

2 min read #Microsoft #SCVMM #VMotion #Hyper-V

For those of you who have not heard yet, Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager R2 was RTM a few days ago.

One thing I noticed on a post on the Microsoft Virtualization Blog was a reference to some of the details that are in the upcoming release (granted this is for the RC and I cannot attest to this being the same for the RTM version) and found these little points of interest.

VMM R2 docs on Quick Storage Migration and the limit of one live migration per host, key passages highlighted

  1. I wonder where Microsoft got this “need” from? Perhaps because it is a feature that has been around in ESX 3.5 since January 2008?
  2. Downtime of less than 2 minutes? (need I say more?)
  3. True by default you can only perform 2 simultaneous vmotions, but this is not a hard limit and can be changed - you can see a good review of the her from Simon Long and Jason Boche in this post.
    I dread to even think if this is true - how long it will take to evacuate a Hyper-V host if they have to be done one by one. At least now you don’t have wait for each one to finish before starting the other - Thanks Microsoft for fixing that one!
  4. For full disclosure - granted Storage vMotion is now only available in the Enterprise Plus version of vSphere (which is not something I am very pleased about) and Microsoft claims that this is completely free (I have yet to confirm this)

On a personal note a small message to Microsoft (and their supporters).

Dear Microsoft,

You have come a long way since Hyper-V version 1. Hyper-V R2 is a great product. I personally use both - and will continue to do so. Each one has their use-cases and their appropriate time and place to be used.

There are a number of features that you still have a lot of catching up to do to get to where VMware is today, but I gather you will get there.

The competition is healthy, and welcomed and me as the customer will benefit from it without a doubt.

I personally have a favorite - but that does not mean that I will not continue to explore new and emerging technologies, be it VMware, Hyper-V, Xen or KVM

Hope you enjoyed the ride!