Long Distance VMotion "VM Teleportation" Thur 10:30

Chad Sakac - VP Technology Alliance EMC - manages the VMware relationship

A packed session, so it must be important to attendees given the number of people who are looking a little worse for wear after last nights party.

Much of this presentation will be conceptual.

All based on federation of storage across long distances
- EMC VPLEX is their new federation product
- NetApp Metrocluster and IBM SVC Stretch cluster is similar
- VPLEX is an active-active model
- Simultaneous access to storage in 2 locations - within or beyond data centres
- Traditional disk replication is like vSphere HA - disruption and then recovery
- VPLEX is more like VMotion - allows for planned disaster avoidance (comment - does this mean that there is still an outage?)
- VPLEX Metro is up to 100km (actually, 5 milliseconds)
- In 2011 VPLEX Geo will handle asynchronous distances
 - Eventually VPLEX Global will be available for truly distrbuted mulit-active model
- Active-active GEO dispersion is possible
- Scale-out of storage brings N+1 for availability - otherwise there will be too many VMware clusters dependent upon too few storage arrays for resilience
- VPLEX Metro Distributed Virtual Volumes allow the data to be visible at the same time in both sites when synchronous
 - VPLEX asynchronous (not yet available!) uses caching to "catch up" - a VM can be VMotioned, but the data follows later.  Its not yet clear what happens if the intersite links are lost during many different use cases.
- Worth noting that VMotion is possible within the domain of a vCenter (ie not the cluster!).  Intra cluster VMotions are parallel, inter-cluster VMotions are serial (ie only one at a time)
- VPLEX can work with pretty much any storage sub-system, not just EMC
- With advance created mirror - Successfully tested vMotion and Storage vMotion acros 100km.  Took 3 hours for the storage and then a few seconds for the VM - can deliver 5 at a time.  So good for planned moves, but not DR


Interesting observation - EMC VPLEX is based on commodity x86 server tech - another demonstration that x86 is Enterprise strength.