Book Image

vSphere Virtual Machine Management

By : Rebecca Fitzhugh
Book Image

vSphere Virtual Machine Management

By: Rebecca Fitzhugh

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (17 chapters)
vSphere Virtual Machine Management
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

vMotion


A virtual machine can be migrated to a different ESXi host while it is powered on (vMotion), powered off (cold migration), or suspended. vSphere vMotion migrates virtual machines from one ESXi host to another without any kind of downtime or disruption. Using this feature, the entire state of a virtual machine is moved from one ESXi host to another while the actual virtual machine files remain in the same datastore.

The state information includes the current memory content and the information that defines a virtual machine. This includes information such as BIOS, devices, CPU, and MAC addresses for Ethernet cards.

vSphere DRS leverages vMotion technology to migrate the virtual machine workload across a cluster. This idea is further explored in Chapter 9, Balancing Resource Utilization and Availability.

So how does vMotion work? A vMotion migration consists of the following actions:

  • The memory state of a virtual machine is copied over the vMotion network from one host to another. Our users...