vMotion features in vSphere 6.0

New features of vMotion in vSphere 6 are Mentioned below

• Cross vSwitch vMotion
• Cross vCenter vMotion
• Long Distance vMotion
• vMotion Network improvements
• No requirement for L2 adjacency any longer!
• vMotion support for Microsoft Clusters using physical RDMs

Cross vSwitch vMotion basically allows you to migrate virtual machines between different vSwitches. Not just from vSS to vSS but also from vSS to vDS and vDS to vDS. Note that vDS to vSS is not supported. This is because when migrating from vDS metadata of the VM is transferred as well and the vSwitch does not have this logic and cannot handle the metadata. Note that the IP Address of the VM that you are migrating will not magically change, so you will need to make sure both the source and the destination portgroup belong to the same layer 2 network. All of this is very useful during for instance Datacenter Migrations or when you are moving VMs between clusters for instance or are migrating to a new vCenter instance even.

Cross vCenter vMotion not only migrates between vCenter Servers but it can do this with all migration types such as: change compute / storage / network. You can even do it without having a shared datastore between the source and destination vCenter aka “shared nothing migration. This functionality will come in handy when you are migrating to a different vCenter instance or even when you are migrating workloads to a different location. Note, it is a requirement for the source and destination vCenter Server to belong to the same SSO domain. when the VM is migrated, things like alarms, events, HA and DRS settings are all migrated with it. So if you have affinity rules or changed the host isolation response or set a limit or reservation it will follow the VM!

Long Distance vMotion. Remember that the max tolerated latency was 10ms for vMotion? With this new feature that just went up to 150ms. Long distance vMotion uses socket buffer resizing techniques to ensure that migrations succeed when latency is high. Note that this will work with any storage system, both VMFS and NFS based solutions are fully supported.

Network enhancements. First and foremost, vMotion traffic is now fully supported over an L3 connection. So no longer is there the need for L2 adjacency for your vMotion network, You can now specify which VMkernel interface should be used for migration of cold data. In previous versions,the Management Network was used to transfer data.

Full support for vMotion of Microsoft Cluster virtual machines is also newly introduced in vSphere 6.0. Note that these VMs will need to use physical RDMs and only supported with Windows 2008, 2008 R2, 2012 and 2012 R2.