Hello,
vMotion Shared Storage Requirements:
1. Configure hosts for vMotion with shared storage to ensure that virtual machines are accessible to both source and target hosts.
2. During a migration with vMotion, the migrating virtual machine must be on storage accessible to both the source and target hosts. Ensure that the hosts configured for vMotion use shared storage. Shared storage can be on a Fibre Channel storage area network (SAN), or can be implemented using iSCSI and NAS.
3. If you use vMotion to migrate virtual machines with raw device mapping (RDM) files, make sure to maintain consistent LUN IDs for RDMs across all participating hosts.
vSphere vMotion Networking Requirements:
1. Migration with vMotion requires correctly configured network interfaces on source and target hosts.
2. Configure each host with at least one network interface for vMotion traffic. To ensure secure data transfer, the vMotion network must be a secure network, accessible only to trusted parties. Additional bandwidth significantly improves vMotion performance. Consider that when you migrate a virtual machine with vMotion without using shared storage, the contents of the virtual disk is transferred over the network as well.
3. You must ensure that the vMotion network has at least 250Mbps of dedicated bandwidth per concurrent vMotion session. Greater bandwidth lets migrations complete more quickly. Gains in throughput resulting from WAN optimization techniques do not count towards the 250Mbps limit.
Network Configuration
1. On each host, configure a VMkernel port group for vMotion.
2. Ensure that virtual machines have access to the same subnets on source and destination hosts.
3. If you are using standard switches for networking, ensure that the network labels used for virtual machine port groups are consistent across hosts. During a migration with vMotion, vCenter Server assigns virtual machines to port groups based on matching network labels.
3. If you are using vSphere Distributed Switches for networking, ensure that source and destination hosts are members of all vSphere Distributed Switches that virtual machines use for networking.
Best Practices for vMotion Networking:
1. Provide the required bandwidth in one of the following ways:
Dedicate at least one GigE adapter for vMotion.
Use at least one 10 GigE adapter if you migrate workloads that have many memory operations.
2. If only two Ethernet adapters are available:
For best security, dedicate the GigE adapter to vMotion, and use VLANs to divide the virtual machine and management traffic on the other adapter.
3. For best availability, combine both adapters into a bond, and use VLANs to divide traffic into networks: one or more for virtual machine traffic and one for vMotion.
4. Alternatively, direct vMotion traffic to one or more physical NICs that are shared between other types of traffic as well.
5. To distribute and allocate more bandwidth to vMotion traffic across several physical NICs, use multiple-NIC vMotion.
6. On a vSphere Distributed Switch 5.1 and later, use Network I/O Control shares to guarantee bandwidth to outgoing vMotion traffic. Defining shares also prevents from contention as a result from excessive vMotion or other traffic.
7. Use traffic shaping in egress direction on the vMotion port group on the destination host to avoid saturation of the physical NIC link as a result from intense incoming vMotion traffic. By using traffic shaping you can limit the average and peak bandwidth available to vMotion traffic, and reserve resources for other traffic types.
8. Provision at least one additional physical NIC as a failover NIC.
9. Use jumbo frames for best vMotion performance.
10. Ensure that jumbo frames are enabled on all network devices that are on the vMotion path including physical NICs, physical switches and virtual switches.