Most IT pro’s in Ireland are familiar with Microsoft Ireland’s Dave Northey and a lot of people outside of Ireland are familar with his cool blog posts and videos that show how to get things working, from A-Z. Dave has a demonstration of Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V that runs on 3 laptops. Before today, it ran on 1 wired NIC and 1 wifi NIC, something that is not supported by MS because it’s unstable. When the demo would work, the VM would fail over from host A to host B with 1 missed ping and file copies would continue seamlessly. After some demo issues, Dave decided to go 100% wired. We’ve been co-presenting on the TechDays tour in Ireland and our last event is in Belfast. Dave showed me his updated demo this afternoon on 100% wired network. Live Migration runs without any missed packets now.
In the demo a ping from the VM to the network has a latency of <1MS, <1MS, etc. Then the VM move starts and it changes to 1MS and 2MS before going back to <1MS, etc. I could never get that to happen just over a year ago with VMware ESX 3.5 on HP blades; we had 1 missed ping on 50% of VMotion moves, something I’ve heard from others. Sure, the applications and users never saw any outage but what Live Migration is doing is very impressive. And that is on laptops!
Dave’s session is scheduled to be recorded so it will go up on the net within a few weeks. Check it out when it happens. I’ll be certain to link to it.