Virtualization

The services delivery framework made possible by the private cloud architectures customers are designing and deploying promises a level of flexibility, resiliency, and efficiency never before envisioned or imagined. With services mobility, IT can take greater control over the data center infrastructure while improving SLAs and user satisfaction.

Long Distance ‘Live Migrations’

Virtualization technologies, in many ways, represent the ground floor, or foundation, for private clouds. Dynamic business requirements are best met through a unified view of storage and server resources that are pooled. These resource pools can deliver the on-demand, scalable IT infrastructure necessary to expand and contract with changing needs.

Recently, long distance ‘live migration’ – or, the ability to migrate VMs (virtual machines) between data centers without interruption or downtime – has reached critical mass in terms of industry awareness. It is not surprising that ‘live migration’ should be the topic of some vendor promise frenzy and even plenty more customer hopes and promises.

The implications of rapidly provisioning and moving VM (“virtual machine”) workloads from one physical machine to another bare metal machine (sometimes many 100s of kilometers away) ‘on the fly’ is powerful. Imagine being able to move VM workloads off a cluster of servers for scheduled maintenance without interrupting end users. Imagine being able to move energy-consuming batch processing jobs to a secondary data center with drastically lower per kilowatt costs.

Cold migrations of VMs (via VMDK transfers over WAN) is already in full swing as many customers are turning to this new technology as a stand-in for backing up applications and storage in order to reduce the overall costs associated with BCDR.

Whether it is ‘hot’ (e.g., VMotion and storage VMotion) or ‘cold’ (e.g., VMDK transfers) migrations, inter-data center VM mobility imposes some stringent requirements on the WAN infrastructure. In many cases, customers are advised to allocate no less than 622Mbps of bandwidth per ‘live’ migration flow and no more than 5ms of end-to-end latency. Infineta’s WAN acceleration solutions are uniquely suited to accelerate VM workflows due to their high throughput and low latency capabilities, allowing customers to leverage VM mobility for a truly end-to-end, elastic private cloud.

Key Challenges

• ‘Live migration’ bandwidth requirements of 622Mbps-per-flow is a showstopper
• VM traffic is extremely latency sensitive
• Transferring large quantities of VMs (e.g., VMDKs) takes seemingly forever and requires precious staff resources to continually monitor, restart, and audit
• Need to support mobility for large # of VMs without over-provisioning scarce WAN resource

Benefits We Deliver

• Maintain high throughout connection for migrating VMs while remaining strictly within end-to-end latency budget
• Easily allocate guaranteed WAN resource to ‘live’ migration traffic
• Support very large TCP connections (up to 1Gbps)