Q: EV V8 and VMotion

[Simon_Eijs]

Hi,

EV V8 is supported to run on VMWare ESX V3.5.

However, what I would like to know is if the use of VMotion is supported, and if so if there are any things we need to watch out for.

In addition, if VMWare ESX runs in the primary and remote part of a twin datacenter (using a MetroCluster for storage), are there specific actions required for EV if a failover from the primary to remote happens or is forced (e.g. startup scripts, boot from SAN)?

Any experience?

What we would like to establish is to use failover facilities of VMWare without having to build a Windows cluster.

Thanks, Simon

[Liam_Finn1 · Accepted solution]

I'm testing this right now.

Yes it does seem to work (at least in a lab setup) on VMotion and on a local network seems to work fine

ESX across a WAN link is a catch. If you have amazing speed like gigaman or direct fiber link between the datacenters then you should be ok. If however you have any latency and you speed it not amazing then you may have issues like performance.

The install on the remote datacenter needs to boot from the same VM as the primary so you may have some boot up issues because of speed to the SAN where your VM is stored. Also the overall performance will suffer a hit if everything is on a remote SAN and being loaded across a WAN link.

But as I said before if you have a direct fiber or something like a gigaman between the two locations it should be ok (from what I have seen so far in my testing.

Also note that when you VM EV there is a decrease in overall throughput so you won’t get the same performance as you did when it was installed on standalone servers or blade servers. Also watch for the paging because any app that pages excessively will have issues in VM and in some cases it is not beneficial to VM those kinds of environments