I am not sure how many people has heard of VMware Long Distance VMotion, although the concept has been supported since fourth quarter of last year. For that, I thought its worth getting people to know about it. It even get more important when deciding on your cloud computing vendor.
At the moment, many companies offer some form of cloud computing services. Some of these cloud services are really nice, specially the one built on VMware Technology. Features like Memory Page Sharing, Memory Over Commitment, VMotion, Storage VMotion, HA, SRM, Snapshot, VMware Data Recovery & so on has made VMware one of the best platforms if not the best for cloud computing. These features has helped cloud computing vendors to offer a highly available & flexible solution for lower cost.
One feature has went missing from most of the cloud computing vendor today, is the ability to transfer the services/virtual machines from a local cloud to remote cloud without requiring downtime. One of the thing cloud computing is promising to offer in the future, is the flexibility to move your services between data centers including local, remote, & hosted data centers. At the moment, no cloud computing vendor that I can recall offer this without requiring a downtime to move the services/VMs across. If you offer VMware Long Distance VMotion for your cloud computing clients or any similar method I would love to hear about it in the comment section below. VMware Long Distance VMotion currently still a bit more complex than most of VMware features & have a high bandwidth requirements, but VMware & storage vendors are working on making it as easy & magical as traditional VMotion.
VMware Long Distance VMotion will allow the users to VMotion virtual machines across different data center, which has never been possible before. VMware Long Distance VMotion will allow you to move your VM to any of your data centers without any downtime. Its just a mind blowing feature that is currently being improved & worth considering if you are planing to move into cloud computing. It can be your safety box, which allow your service to move back to your data center without downtime or from a data center provider to another without downtime at all (Very important so you are not stuck with your cloud computing vendor for ever).
Below is a great video of VMware Long Distance VMotion & you might want to read the articles linked to below the video to find out more about how it work & best practices to setup VMware Long Distance VMotion.
Below are few articles that you much look at if the above has grabbed your attention:
VMworld 2009: Long Distance VMotion (TA3105) by EMC Virtual Geek – Chad Sakac
VMworld ’09 – Long Distance VMotion (TA3105) by Joep Piscaer
I hope this article was useful & enjoyable for you. Please be kind enough to comment on this article & share with the rest of us what do u think of this feature & what do u think is missing in it to make it work for you.