Just as Microsoft is proud to present users with live migration in Hyper-V 2.0, VMware announces that it supports long distance VMotion up to 200 Kilometers. As a VMware Premier Partner we already heard this was coming but we never realized it would be available this soon.

Long distance VMotion is the first step in enabling cloud services, it provides customers with the possibility to move virtual machines from a private to a public cloud or vice versa or enable clients to ‘follow the sun/moon’ simply by VMotioning the virtual machines to a remote datacenter. It can also be used as a pre-SRM kind of tool by VMotioning a complete datacenter when you see there’s trouble coming (tornados/floods/etc).

Of course this great feature does not come without some limitations. You need a WAN connection with minimal 622Mb/s and a maximum latency of  5 ms.

Edit: Joep Piscaer from VirtualLifestyle.nl attended breakout session TA3105, Long distance VMotion, and wrote a great report and recorded a video which you can see/read here.

Tags: VMware

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 3rd, 2009 at 19:49 and is filed under VMware, VMworld. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.