Long Distance vMotion by Cisco & VMware
Cisco and VMware are currently working on a new technology called Long Distance vMotion. This makes it possible to move application workloads between multiple datacenters without any downtime. The vMotion technology is already available within VMware vSphere. It is used to migrate one VM from one host to another or wit Storage vMotion move the VMs data from one storage location to another. This with the machine being fully operable and available to the end-user.
The changing model of data center management and provisioning allows VMware VMotion to be used for several purposes without violating the application SLAs.
● Data center maintenance without downtime: Applications on a server or data center infrastructure requiring maintenance can be migrated offsite without downtime.
● Disaster avoidance: Data centers in the path of natural calamities (such as hurricanes) can proactively migrate the mission-critical application environments to another data center.
● Data center migration or consolidation: Migrate applications from one data center to another without business downtime as part of a data center migration or consolidation effort.
● Data center expansion: Migrate virtual machines to a secondary data center as part of data center expansion to address power, cooling, and space constraints in the primary data center.
● Workload balancing across multiple sites: Migrate virtual machines between data centers to provide compute power from data centers closer to the clients (“follow the sun”) or to load-balance across multiple sites. Enterprises with multiple sites can also conserve power and reduce cooling costs by dynamically consolidating virtual machines into fewer data centers (automated by VMware Dynamic Power Management [DPM]), another feature enabling the green data center of the future.
In these cases the secondary cloud can be provided by a service provider through a “virtual private cloud” connected to your “internal cloud”. Bringing down the TCO of your server infrastructure, using capacity in the secondary datacenter only when you need it and making use of a pay-per-use model for the consumed capacity. So this technology is a real cloud enabler!
For more information about this technology can be found here. Written by Omar Sultan.
Read the paper on this subject created by Cisco and VMware here.
Power over vSwitch back to where it belongs
With the upcoming new version of ESX on the horizon, Cisco published more an more detail on the Nexus 1000V. The Nexus 1000V is Cisco's virtual switch which intergrates directly with ESX creating one distributed over all your ESX hosts. Besides this distrbuted switch Cisco also integrates the them in their management software. This gives network administrators the possibility to manage all switches, physical and virtual. Giving the power of networking back to where it belongs; with the network admins.
Cisco Nexus 1000v with policy based VM connectivity
More information about the Cisco Nexus 1000V can be found here. A nice video can be found here.
But during a presentation I attended Cisco also explained the Unified I/O concept. That was something that was new to me. But it's going to be possible to combine network and storage traffic over one connection a.k.a. Unified I/O. Wow! That's great. That would result in only two cables going into my server. But how does it work? Currently we have 10 Gbit available, but in the next year 40 / 100 Gbit will be introduced.
Combined with the ever growing capacity of CPU and RAM in servers this will result in VM host monsters. But how are all these new techonologies going to integrate with one another. Thankfully Brad Hedlund a Consulting System Engineer with Cisco and CCIE has written an article to explain this in detail. You can read about it here.
And as always a picture says more then a thousand words :
Click on picture for more detail