VMWare vMotion Migration Process

vMotion is used to move a powered on virtual machine from one host to another

VMWare vMotion can be be used to :

• Improve overall hardware utilization
• Allow continued virtual machine operation while accomodating scheduled hardware downtime.
• Allow vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler(DRS) to balance virtual machines between hosts.

How vMotion Migration works:

vMotion Migration is achieved by moving the memory state from one host to another across the vMotion network which is private, non-routed, gigabit or faster network connection between two hosts involved in the vMotion migration.

However, vMotion can be done only if certain requirements are met:

1. The hosts between which the vMotion need to be performed must have a shared storage.

2. The participating hosts must have identical networks.

In addition to that, requirements for VM are:

1. A virtual machine should not have connection to a virtual device with a local image mounted.

2. A virtual machine must not have connection to an internal switch(vSwitch with zero uplinks)

3. A virtual machine must not have CPU affinity configured.

Moreover, source and destination hosts must have:

1. Visibility to all storage (Fiber Channel, iSCSI or NAS) used by the virtual machine.

2. At least a gigabit ethernet network

• Four concurrent vMotion migration on a 1 Gbps network
• Eight concurrent vMotion migration on a 10 Gbps network

3. Access to same physical network

4. Compatible CPUs