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1. Re: Vmotion to colo site
ejward Mar 26, 2008 8:23 AM (in response to tateharmann)1 person found this helpfulThere's two different networks. Vmotion has it's own network. I think for Vmotion to work, this part has to be on the same subnet. I'm not sure if 50Meg is enough bandwidth though. What does Vmware recommend? I know that they usually tell you not to Vmotion outside the datacenter.
For the VM's LAN perspective, you can do it exactly the same way you would if it were a physical machine. If you picked up a physical machine in building A and brought it to building B, would it be able to communicate on the network? If not, then the VM won't work.
Now storage. Does the ESX host in both buildings see the same storage or, does the host in the other building only see the replica? To Vmotion, they need to see the same storage. If both hosts see the storage in building A, vmotion will work but, that's not a solution if building A goes away. If they are pointing to seperate replicated storage then vmotion won't work but, if building A goes away, you are protected. There would be a lot of manual stuff to do but, you could get things going.
If you're interested, Equallogic is having a web demo on this subject in about 30 minutes.
https://equallogic.webex.com/equallogic/onstage/g.php?d=594665527&t=a
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2. Re: Vmotion to colo site
tateharmann Mar 26, 2008 8:53 AM (in response to ejward)Thank you for the reply. Do you know what the password for the demo is?
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3. Re: Vmotion to colo site
David Ank Mar 26, 2008 3:39 PM (in response to tateharmann)Hi,
As far as I know VMware say that 1GB Ethernet is required for Vmotion, so I don't think that 50MB over WAN will be your answer.
Regarding the network subnets, if you Vmotion server between two subnets you should change its IP address.
You can consider this,
If you have storage sync between the sites (something like Netapp SnapMirror ) and you don't have to perform live Vmotion as the VM is started, maybe you can consider shutting down the VM perform a sync between the two storage systems and boot the machine on the target site...
Regards,
David
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4. Re: Vmotion to colo site
ejward Mar 26, 2008 5:46 PM (in response to tateharmann)When I went to do the demo, it wouldn't load. You have to sign up in advanced. They are doing it again next week sometime. You can sign up on Equallogic's site.
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5. Re: Vmotion to colo site
ejward Mar 26, 2008 5:48 PM (in response to ejward)1 person found this helpfulI think 1GB is recommended but, I'm willing to bet 50MB might work to some degree. I would not base your whole system design on this post though. Is there a way for you to test it? I've had my Vmotion network going through a 100MB switch for a while and it seemed to work fine.
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6. Re: Vmotion to colo site
tateharmann Mar 27, 2008 9:21 AM (in response to ejward)Thanks guys! I guess the real problem isn't really vmotion but a networking issue. You said if you can't pick the box up and move it to the new location and plug it in and have it work...then it won't work period (with vmotion or just vm machines for that matter). That makes sense. This is doable with some servers because upon moving them we can just change the ip and dns info and be golden. We have some applications (like our accounting system) that won't work though. The clients have a hard-coded ip address and it's running on over 100 workstations around the country, so the admin overhead would be a nightmare. It wouldn't be impossible, but I think it would just be easier to keep our colo site bridged to our existing network instead of routing to it, then we could actually take down virtual machines here and pop them up at the colo and continue running w/o too much admin. Does anyone forsee any problems running like that? Does anyonme else bridge to their colo site instead of routing to it?
Thanks again,
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7. Re: Vmotion to colo site
David Ank Mar 27, 2008 3:14 PM (in response to tateharmann)Are you planing to vmotion over the 50MB WAN?
If so I think that I won't count on it to work well, and won't try this on production environment.
As my friend ejward says vmotion also may work in 100MB Ethernet, and it did so for me too but it was in LAN and not WAN...
If you can build a test environment for this it would be the best.
Regards,
David