VMware
1 2 3 4 Previous Next 46 Replies Last post: Mar 13, 2006 11:51 AM by Brucealeg   Go to original post
Click to view Rich Claypole's profile Novice 7 posts since
Feb 28, 2006
I was in a meeting with a customer, a 2nd consultancy company and Microsoft last week and both the 2nd consultancy and MS suggested that no one would really ever use VMotion in a production environment with critical servers, they would rather power them off, take the hit in downtime and move manually rather than trust the server to be Vmotioned safely.

Thoughts from people out there that already use this technology in critical production environments?

I feel this is a valid point as people often use the Vmotion argument when comparing Virtual Server and ESX.

For the record I would always opt for ESX over the current Virtual Server offering.

I lnpw the bias on here is always going to be VMware, but just how reliable is VMotion in the real world? I ask because I have not had chacne to use it in a live environment yet.
Click to view rrosenkoetter's profile Expert 551 posts since
Feb 3, 2004
My Virtual Center console shows 215 VMs provisioned, 806 VMs Migrated.

I move live production servers around ALL the time via VMotion and have never had a problem.

And I work at H&R Block, and it's tax season. :) Believe me, I DON'T want servers going down this time of the year.

I had a memory module show as degraded the other day. The server didn't go down, but Insight Manager was telling me to replace it before it failed. I moved all the VMs off in the middle of day and replaced the memory, and then moved them all back.

Beautiful.

This server was hosting 18 VMs. I don't even want to think about hard it would have been to find a common maintenance window for 18 different servers in order to take them all down at once.

I'm sure I would have had to drive 45 minutes into work at 3:00 am, replace ONE memory module, and then drive 45 minutes back home.

Instead I VMotioned 18 VMs off (2 or 3 to each of my other servers), replaced the memory module, and VMotioned 18 VMs back. While eating my lunch.

The trick is design your capacity to give yourself the ability to recover from a completely failed VMware server or in case of maintenance work like this.
Click to view knudt's profile Hot Shot 336 posts since
Nov 9, 2004
Instead I VMotioned 18 VMs off (2 or 3 to each of my
other servers), replaced the memory module, and
VMotioned 18 VMs back. While eating my lunch.

The trick is design your capacity to give yourself
the ability to recover from a completely failed
VMware server or in case of maintenance work like
this.


There is one other trick:
Not getting crumbs in the server while it's opened :)
Click to view sbeaver's profile Guru 7,719 posts since
Nov 1, 2004
I second what others have said. I have vmotioned during the day to work on the physical boxes without problems and lets me do my work during the day. What is not to like about that.

Vmotion is the bread and butter of VC and one of the biggest joys about it. The others do not have anything to compare to it so they have to find something to complain about.
Click to view Ken.Cline's profile Champion 5,146 posts since
Jul 7, 2004
Yep. VMotion is used by LOTS of companies for migrating mission critical systems (and as Ron suggested - DURING BUSINESS HOURS). This one feature makes the old "work late, work weekends so you don't interrupt production services" routine a thing of the past. With so many companies focusing on:

1) Cutting Costs...think of the reduction in overtime hours here!

2) Work/Life Balance...has made more than one spousal unit MUCH happier

With ESX 3 and the ability to dynamically balance workloads (that's going to take some proving before lots of folks use it in production!), it's going to become transparent which physical host a workload lives on - and it will be migrated around as resource demands warrant...
Click to view kimono's profile Master 1,992 posts since
Mar 3, 2005
I was in a meeting with a customer, a 2nd consultancy
company and Microsoft last week and both the 2nd
consultancy and MS suggested that no one would really
ever use VMotion in a production environment with
critical servers, they would rather power them off,
take the hit in downtime and move manually rather
than trust the server to be Vmotioned safely.

Thoughts from people out there that already use this
technology in critical production environments?

It's all just jealousy from Microsoft because they have no idea about the technology and how well it works moving their windows systems around. What amazes people when they begin to get into ESX and VC is the amazing depth of the product. It's so much more then MSVS will ever be. My gut feel is that it's only a matter of time before another virtualization vendor cracks the vmotion egg, but at least Vmware will be the first and the best at it. And yes, we vmotion production systems carrying hundreds of concurrent users (and thousands of students) during business hours without hearing a peep from the stakeholders. Take Notice Microsoft!

Click to view dpomeroy's profile Virtuoso 3,901 posts since
Apr 12, 2004
vMotion is simply awesome. Occasionally I have a problem, but I have done hundreds of vMotions with only a few problems (better than 99% successful). Recently when I received a few memory errors on a ESX server I was able to vMotion all the (22) VMs off before the server could crash, during the day, nobody noticed a thing.
DRS will take it to a whole new level.
Click to view dpomeroy's profile Virtuoso 3,901 posts since
Apr 12, 2004
One good thing about MSVS, without it we might not have the FREE VMware Server product!

ESX is clearly better in all aspects, I would even say price when you consider ALL costs, but never underestimate Microsoft.

Click to view sbeaver's profile Guru 7,719 posts since
Nov 1, 2004
but never underestimate Microsoft.

Especally when they can spend millions on R & D. It will be interesting to see where they are in 5 or 10 years
Click to view larstr's profile Virtuoso 2,382 posts since
Mar 11, 2004
but never underestimate Microsoft.

Especally when they can spend millions on R & D. It


And twice as much in marketing.
Click to view king@it.ibm.com's profile Virtuoso 2,927 posts since
Jan 16, 2004
Rich,

Thoughts from people out there that already use this technology in >critical production environments?

I have personally seen VMotion failing in many manners (not often but it happens).

But this is not the point. Especially from MS. If I was in that meeting I would have told them "True, but would you have used Microsoft Windows for production environments at first (assuming you can really use it today for mission critical environments? I am glad my bank account records are still on a mainframe BTW ...) ? "

MS is MS but they are not dead at all.

Massimo.
Click to view Daryll's profile Master 2,346 posts since
Jul 10, 2003
Oh my.

This post was a pleasure to read.

Thank you, seriously :) I am going to show this post to a couple of my managers because it'll make them smile too.

-Daryll
Click to view dpomeroy's profile Virtuoso 3,901 posts since
Apr 12, 2004
yep, even at "FREE" MSVS costs more and has less features.
Click to view mike008's profile Enthusiast 95 posts since
Apr 7, 2004
"both the 2nd consultancy and MS suggested that no one would really ever use VMotion in a production environment with critical servers, they would rather power them off, take the hit in downtime and move manually rather than trust the server to be Vmotioned safely. "

Thanks for the laugh. If you are paying for the consultants advice, fire them. They are deep in bed with Microsoft. vMotion-like functionality is top priority for the Microsoft virtual server group for a reason. I use vMotion to migrate production servers daily with very few failures. When it does fail, it fails gracefully (just remains on source) and for good reason (not enought resources on target, cpu mismatch, etc.) Bottom line is vMotion is production ready and tried and proven in production environments. For now, that is one of the biggest, if not the biggest advantage VMware has over Microsoft and other competitors.

VMware Developer

SDKs, APIs, Videos, Learn and much more in the Developer community.

Learn More

Developer Sample Code

Increase your developer productivity with VMware API sample code.

Learn More

VMworld Sessions & Labs

Online access to the latest VMworld Sessions & Labs and online services.

Learn more

Purchase PSO Credits Online

Purchase credits to redeem training and consulting services online.

Buy Now

Community Hardware Software

View reported configurations or report your own.

Learn More

VMware vSphere

Come witness the next giant leap in virtualization.

Register Today

Communities