vMotion Architecture, Performance, and Best Practices in VMware vSphere 5

This white paper presents a brief description of vMotion performance enhancements in vSphere 5, and performance implications of this technology, with a chapter dedicated to VDI (should you feel you need VMotion there)

Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and cloud are the fastest-growing environments today. They have similar characteristics, such as high virtual machine consolidation ratios, with typically hundreds of small to mediumsized desktop virtual machines consolidated on a single host. The administrators of these environments find the benefits of vMotion very appealing, such as the following:

Datacenter maintenance without downtime: Move or evacuate all the virtual machines off a vSphere host that requires downtime (for hardware replacement, firmware upgrade, and so on), with no disruption in service. Troubleshooting: Move all the virtual machines off a vSphere host for troubleshooting suspected issues with underlying hardware.

In VDI/cloud environments, the overall migration time in virtual machine evacuation scenarios is a very important measure, because the goal is to minimize service interruption time. So, unlike the previous tests that focus on both the total migration time and application performance during vMotion, the primary focus of these tests is to measure the total migration time. Testing shows how well vMotion can take advantage of all the server resources (including CPU, memory and network) to minimize overall migration time. This study uses VMware View™ to implement virtualized desktop systems. Virtualized desktop systems, enabled through VMware View, run in virtual machines on vSphere hosts and provide complete, isolated PC
environments to end users. Users can flexibly access their desktop environments from any location, from any client. This solution also tremendously benefits IT administrators because it enables them to gain centralized control over desktop computing resources as well as the ability to optimize resource utilization through virtual machine consolidation.

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