After being trounced in the live migration game for many years, Microsoft has finally had enough. For those not keeping close track of the narrative, it has gone something like this:
- What’s a virtual machine? (VMware vSphere 4 era and prior)
- VMotion is a “gimmick” and a “bad idea” – but Quick Migration is good enough
- Hyper-V R2 serial live migration is just as good as concurrent vMotion in vSphere
But it’s all about to change with the upcoming release of Windows Server 2012. Soon, Hyper-V administrators will be able to migrate an unlimited number of virtual machines at once. How’s that for amazing: going from one concurrent live migration in the currently shipping release to infinity — and beyond — in the next! VMware, limited to a measly 8 concurrent migrations over 10GbE, lags far behind infinity.
A vendor that is confident enough in a platform to declare that it can handle “unlimited” scale might back up such a claim with a commensurate default configuration. For instance, if VMware vSphere concurrent vMotion maximum is 8 for 10Gb networks, then you would reasonably expect Microsoft Hyper-V 3 to either have no limitations out of the box or at least one that is significantly higher than vSphere, such as 16.
That’s why it’s kind of odd that Hyper-V 3 ships with a default concurrent live migration limit of two:
Also note that this appears to be a per-host setting — one should refrain from speculating on what happens if source and destination hosts are configured with different limits. “Abort, Retry, Fail?” does come to mind.
It’s only a matter of time before a well-meaning Hyper-V fanboy puts this unlimited live migration claim to the test, most likely with a huge number of idle, sub-1GB virtual machines — despite the fact that the pre-release Windows license agreement forbids disclosure of any performance testing results. Whatever the result, unless your datacenter is full of tiny VMs doing absolutely no work, it’s not much of a comparison.
In the end, making claims of “unlimited” scalability is a sure sign of desperation — even for a multi-billion dollar corporation.
UPDATE: It turns out that someone has already pushed the limits of Hyper-V 3 concurrent live migrations. Needless to say, the tiny, idle VMs migrated flawlessly and without violating customer SLAs.
>See what works best. Then tune it. If you’re on 1 GbE, then maybe try 10 and work your way
>down. If you’re on 10 GbE converged fabric then try something like what I did. Find the sweet
>spot and then stick with that.
Yeah … try that with your 5 production SAP instances and 10 Exchange modules. If they fail and people complain you can just tell them “hey hey take it easy … that’s how I do tests with my XBox at home… what’s the matter with you?”
Massimo Re Ferre’ (VMware).
@Massimo or something like “at least we didn’t pay for that” 🙂
Really? Aidan notes that he successfully was running 60 concurrent live migrations. You might want to try reading the article you referenced.
That’s exactly what we did, and we noticed ‘I deployed 60 * 512 MB RAM Ubuntu VMs’ not ‘I deployed 60 * 4096 MB RAM WhateverOS VMs AND starting a RAM consuming app loop to actually transfert something’. Got it ?
looks like Aidan is getting under VMware’s skin, just like the rest of Microsoft 🙂
60 * 512MB VMs , doing nothing … a very useful reference.
Which real application today can actually run on a 512MB VM ?
What a joke ….
hmm grasping at straws again are we.. I’ve done 9+ concurrently live migrations each vm was 4gigs and they were running what we see as our average cpu load, no issues were detected and we didn’t have 4x10gigs just 1×10, yes the 10gig pipe was full and things were not quite instantly done but more then fast enough for us . In another test we almost doubled that perf with infiniband based networking.
interesting how most of the comments are from VMware people .. lol … the heat is on and they don’t like it one little bit …
@Thomas this isn’t about the “heat” being on or anything. I think the VMware and the MS goals are pretty different at this stage. VMware have roughly 300+K customers that are trusting their technology to run their mission critical workloads. Microsoft is trying to grasp/steal as many customers as possible from VMware and I think a good eye-catching “unlimited” on those comparison slides is a way to claim they are better. Fair enough. If they (MS) fail they don’t have too much to lose anyway.
Simply put … it is the difference between the responsibility of flying a Boeing 777 full of passengers Vs driving your Toys-R-us electric RC car with a remote. If you crash into a wall with your toy no one will care. Try to crash a Boeing 777 and you tell me.
I wish VMware could do the same. Would be much more fun here. Unfortunately we have customers.
Massimo.
Only 300k customers, I’m not impressed one bit!
also I’m pretty sure that number was just pulled out of your ….
Please see the following site and note that VMware currently cites 350,000 customers and 50,000 partners. http://www.vmware.com/company/
If you think that is a fabricated number, you’re entitled to your opinion.
Eric
Really the number if even 350k is still not very impressive.
Here I think you are very wrong indeed. Spin it all you like, Windows Server 2012 provides the same, if not more that what you charge a lot for. Customers know it, and they know its not a toy.
And the flip flop on your licensing back to socket and starting to bundle products is because?
As of today, outside of a few elite, high-touch special customers working directly with Microsoft, there are approximately zero public or private clouds based on Windows 2012 Hyper-V and System Center 2012. SC2012 SP1, required for management of Windows 2012, is currently pre-beta and the license agreement specifically disallows using in a production environment.
Those are the facts. Future excitement about unreleased products does not equate to solving business problems today.
Eric
also both sides are making “absolute” statements as in “System Center 2012. SC2012 SP1, required for management” its not a requirement any more then vsphere is a requirement to run esxi…
business problems .. oh like software defined networking? You know that $BILLION+ acquisition you guys made for Nicira?. That too is built-into Windows Server 2012 .. oh and you don’t have to pay for that either
> That [Nicira technology] too is built-into Windows Server 2012
@Thomas, what did you smoke?
@thomas what nicira tech does is nothing like whats included in 2012, so in this case Massimo finally has something right.
with that said the following will give you more insight as to whats going on http://blogs.technet.com/b/windowsserver/archive/2012/08/22/software-defined-networking-enabled-in-windows-server-2012-and-system-center-2012-sp1-virtual-machine-manager.aspx
Congratulations, Massimo. You *finally* got something right. LOL!
Was referring to sdn capabilities
MS folks shared this… No Live Migration between Hyper v 2 to Hyper v 3.. I think this is major drawback . I would still think to have load on Hyper V for production environment.
Hyper-V 3 is doing so well for us, we have decided to move back to Esx5. At least it works, and has performance you can count on. Server 2012 and Hyper-V is simply still all over the place. We recently lost all performance on a host (and all VM’s, of course) because gpupdate got its’ panties in a twist, and that server doesn’t even have any GPO’s assigned.