Enabling Long Distance Live Migration with F5 and VMware vMotion

As more and more companies offer different way of doing cloud computing, the concept it self is getting fuzzier to the consumer. Further, after VMware has prompted the idea of Hybrid Cloud Computing, many other companies have copied the road map as usual and started to talk about it as being the first to promote it. The funny part is when you look about how to move workload between the Private & Public cloud which was one of the matters discussed in VMware original Hyprid Cloud plan, you will find not much of an answer or plan at most vendors. VMware VCloud Connector was the first part of the answer to this strategy, but not yet the full solution. Things that are coming in the future should enable the workload to move across the Private and Public Cloud with zero downtime to enable a real Hybrid Cloud. This will require a long distance vmotion to work across datacenters. Today many solutions are out there to enable VMware Long Distance VMotion between datacenters, & it get me wondering how thing will look like when these are fully integrated with vCloud Director/vCloud Connector out of the box in the future. That seems to give us a real Hybrid Cloud Computing that we were talking about.

Today, I have just been going across the different long distance vmotion options out there and was looking for an option that least restrictive on the utilized hardware. I have came across a white paper sent to me by a colleague on how F5 can enable Long Distance Live Migration with VMotion. The article is quite interesting specially it show the steps F5 are utilizing to enable a long distance VMotion. I thought I will share this white paper for those of you of interest in Long Distance VMotion & who want to look at how Virtual Machines will be moving in the Hybrid Cloud in the future. You can find the F5 white paper at:  http://www.f5.com/pdf/white-papers/cloud-vmotion-f5-wp.pdf

Enjoy your journey to the Hybrid Cloud Computing with VMware, as it is more of a full journey than a one bus stop trip.

Comments

  1. I dun think the f5 solution is complete as the missing portion to be address on the network cross data center and also the data availability during and after vmotion. In the mid of process, you will experience high latency if your site interconnect bandwidth are not good enough. For long distance vmotion today, netapp metro cluster and emc vplex is proven workable with certain criteria behind.

    Cisco live recently had also discuss about the stretch vlan and otv concept which you need to consider on the network layer. You can refer to scott lowe blog for more details

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