Use VirtualCenter Maps Tab to confirm VMotion
December 15th, 2008 | 
Author: 
Eric Sloof’s A whiter shade of green is an informative post about how the Maps tab in VMware VirtualCenter (VC) can be used to visually confirm if a VM can be live migrated between ESX hosts. By selecting a VM in the tree explorer of VC and then clicking the Maps tab (not the Maps button), you can see a diagram of all of the ESX servers, virtual networking, and storage that must be consistently shared between hosts for VMotion to succeed. As my borrowed version of Eric’s orignal screen shot image shows, when all are configured correctly the ESX hosts have green circles around / behind them.
When the green circles do not appear, the Maps view helps troubleshoot what is wrong because you can see exactly which pieces are not connected correctly in the diagram.
What I did not realize, and Eric’s post points out, is that
there are different shades of green that appear on the Maps tab.
“If one of your ESX servers is under a heavy load it’ll show a light green colour. On the other hand, when one of your ESX server is not CPU intensive at all, it will show up dark green.”
Now that I know this, recognizing what hosts have a darker green circle from the Maps tab is a quick and convenient way to pick a host that has the best available resources for a manual VM migration.
Posted in 
Tags: 
