While at Cisco Live I stopped by the VMware booth to check out the proof-of-concept that VMware and Cisco are currently doing involving extended distance VMotion. VMware’s latest information about it is here. The idea behind this is that you can distribute your CPU resources in multiple sites. This should be especially useful for those running out of space, power, and/or cooling in existing data centers. Now you can split your infrastructure without losing the benefits of virtualization.
The great thing about this is that it doesn’t require anything special. No magical network hardware. No software updates or changes. So what are they testing? Simply, they are putting parameters and processes around the implementation and support. How far is too far? How much bandwidth do you need? What is the impact on an application when it is cut over? Looking at the demonstration that VMware is showing and the results from the initial testing it appears that the impact will be minimal. The switchover time is only a little bit longer at 80KM than it was with the servers sitting in the same room. They also went further to test the impact on a SQL server by having the VM in one location and the storage in another, connected by FCIP. The degradation was minimal, just a few percent, if even that.
I’m curious to see what the final supported distances and bandwidth requirements will be. VMware is saying they’ll be giving a lot more in-depth information on this in August and hopefully fill in some of those missing pieces.
