Quick Look at VMware vSphere 6.0: vMotion Options

VMware recently released VMware vSphere 6.0 into the marketplace. The latest vSphere version is packed full of more than 650 technological breakthroughs! It’s more powerful, more flexible, more secure and more easily managed than ever before.  In this series, Global Knowledge instructor, Bill Ferguson will highlight several features that make VMware vSphere 6.0 a game changer.

vMotion, as you may know, is the capability to move the state of a running VM from one physical host to another host without user disruption. It requires the two VMs to be on the same datacenter, in the same cluster; have hosts sharing the same storage, on the same LAN, on same Layer 3, on the same switch; and on the same vCenter — if you are still using vSphere 4.0! However, each newer version of vSphere has gradually “whittled down” the requirements of vMotion, and vSphere 6.0 has removed all but the “same datacenter” requirement.

This means that if you want to move the state of a running VM from one host to another and they are in the same datacenter, then you can do it even if they are not on the same cluster, switch, Layer 3, or vCenter. Since many organizations currently have more than one vCenter, this flexibility provides a tool that they can use for maintenance activities, disaster recovery and even disaster avoidance.

In addition, Long Distance vMotion now allows you to vMotion over WAN connections as long as they provide less than a 100ms round trip time. Also, vSphere 6.0 can leverage Cross-Host vMotion (which originated with vSphere 5.5) to vMotion VMs even if the source and destination hosts do not have shared storage. Truly, the only “wall” that remains in regard to vMotion is the datacenter… vSphere 7.0?

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