“Although Storage VMotion is designed to work with any type of storage, it was initially supported only with Fibre Channel SANs. As of Update 1, Storage VMotion is supported with iSCSI SAN’s for moving virtual machine disk files in the following scenarios:

- From iSCSI SANs to other iSCSI SANs

- From iSCSI SANs to FibreChannel SANs

- From FibreChannel SANs to iSCSI SANs

In addition, we now support the use of 10Gb Ethernet for iSCSI in a VMware Infrastructure environment.”

In my experience Storage VMotion has worked great, but be careful with VMs that have higher I/O utilizations.

Much like what happens when you commit snapshots, the task takes longer to complete and users are more likely to experience loss of service when live migrating heavy I/O guests. Moving those same guests across the network to iSCSI storage will only add to the probability of brief server disconnects. Consider performing a Storage VMotion of these guests outside of normal business hours.

How do you know which VMs have the heaviest I/O? Use the VirtualCenter Performance data or esxtop from the Service Console to identify them!

Technorati Tags: virtualization, vmware, esx, storage vmotion, iscsi

VMware VI3.5 is scheduled to be generally available by the end of 2007. Based on a public .pdf released by VMware, this post is my summary of the new features. I’m guessing this .pdf is really a .ppt presentation that VMware is delivering, but I have not attended this presentation myself.

The screen shot is from the document and shows the new features in the defined layers.

After some sales and marketing slides the document classifies the VI3 features today across 3 layers. These layers are then used to group the new features for the rest of the presentation.

The features are divided into 3 layers:

1. Platform – ESX server
2. Virtual Infrastructure – combining multiple ESX servers in farms and resource clusters for VMs
3. Management – automated IT processes for administration

Here’s my feature summary table in .pdf format

Here is the full VMware .pdf – What’s New with VI3.5_public.pdf

A description of the new features can be found in VMware’s news release

Here is the description of the new features from VMware’s announcement:

Virtualization platform enhancements help deliver new levels of performance, scalability and compatibility for running the most demanding workloads in virtual machines:

• Expanded storage and networking choices such as support for SATA local storage, 10 Gig Ethernet, and Infiniband expand storage and networking choices for virtual infrastructure
• Support for TCP Segment Offload and Jumbo frames reduce the CPU overhead associated with processing network I/O
• Support for hardware nested page tables such as in processor assists for memory virtualization
• Support for paravirtualized Linux guest operating systems enables higher levels of performance through virtualization-aware operating systems
• Support for virtual machines with 64GB of RAM and physical machines with up to 128GB of memory

New virtual infrastructure capabilities help deliver increased infrastructure availability and resilience:

• VMware Storage VMotion enables live migration of virtual machine disks from one data storage system to another with no disruption or downtime. VMware VMotion has become an indispensable tool for many infrastructure administrators to dynamically balance their server workloads and eliminate planned downtime for server maintenance. Storage VMotion extends VMotion to storage resources of a virtual machine, namely virtual disks. Using Storage VMotion, administrators can dynamically balance the storage workload and address performance bottlenecks by migrating virtual machine disks to the best available storage resource. Administrators can minimize service disruption previously incurred for upgrading storage arrays and free storage administrators to improve and manage the storage infrastructure without having to co-ordinate extensively with application and server owners.
• VMware Update Manager automates patch and update management for VMware ESX Server hosts and virtual machines. Update Manager addresses one of the most significant pain points for every IT department: tracking patch levels and manually applying the latest security/bug fixes. Patching of offline virtual machines enforces higher levels of patch standards compliance than physical environments. Integration with VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) enables zero-downtime VMware ESX Server host patching capabilities.

New virtual infrastructure management solutions help deliver increased automation for streamlined managed of IT environments.

• VMware Distributed Power Management is an experimental feature that reduces power consumption in the data center through intelligent workload balancing. Working in conjunction with VMware DRS, Distributed Power Management is designed to automatically power off servers not currently needed in order to meet service levels, and automatically power on servers as demand for compute resources increases.
• VMware Guided Consolidation, a feature of VMware VirtualCenter enables companies to get started with server consolidation in a step-by-step tutorial fashion. A wizard discovers physical servers, identifies consolidation candidates, converts them to virtual machines, and leveraging intelligently places them onto the best VMware ESX Server or VMware Server hosts. Guided Consolidation helps to make the consolidation process quick and easy for users with little knowledge of virtualization.

blog.scottlowe.org has some great notes on this session. Here’s my thoughts on what I missed.

Several people told me about the “which feature of virtualization do you wish you could do to yourself” interview video. We all can relate to the guy who made the comment about making snap shots of himself he could revert to after saying something stupid to his wife. Personally, Thursday I could have used replication. I wish the San Francisco Marriott had been my DR site for the Hayward Fairfield Inn. I was definitely offline at my primary site that morning!

VMware co-founder and Chief Scientist, Mendel Rosenblum then talked about, and demo-ed some pretty amazing stuff.

1. Storage VMotion is the reverse of normal VMotion. That is, a running guest VM remains in control of a single ESX host while it’s volume folder and all it’s files are transferred from one LUN to another. Tell me you could not use that ability. Mendel provided a live demo for everyone in attendance too.
2. Streaming virtual appliances was also discussed. This is the ability to start using a VA before you have completely downloaded the entire VM. With a little prefetching magic the VM could start instantly. This has huge potential in the VDI scenario. Could this change the DR fail-over strategy too? I will have to research this some more.
3. Continuous availability is the process of capturing the live stream from one VM and redirecting it to another VM. This would take HA to the next level because instead of a power off / power on recovery between hosts you would now be able to have tradional cluster node-ish fail-over. There was a demo of two Exchange servers running Loadsim to simulate mail usage. When Mendell pulled the power cord on one of the ESX hosts the Exchange clients barely noticed the difference. Can you say “WOW”? (BTW, that’s Wow backwards in case you missed it.)

There was a pre Thursday buzz about the new VMServer. A lot of people believed this product would also be discussed in the morning keynote. Apparently it was not brought up.