Comments on: AMD and Red Hat Demonstrate Cross-Platform Live Migration

By: Welcome to vSphere-land! » VMotion Links

Welcome to vSphere-land! » VMotion Links — Mon, 11 May 2009 00:20:43 +0000

[...] What is Enhanced VMotion Compatibility anyway? Enhanced Vmotion Compatibility (EVC) – Intel Example AMD and Red Hat Demonstrate Cross-Platform Live Migration VMotion Performance Author: esiebert7625 Categories: General/VI3 Links Tags: VMotion [...]

By: Live migration van Intel naar AMD inderdaad problematisch « EarlyBert

Live migration van Intel naar AMD inderdaad problematisch « EarlyBert — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 09:34:23 +0000

[...] Zie ook Mike D’s blog voor nog meer uitleg en leidend tot dezelfde conclusie. Possibly related posts: (automatically [...]

By: vanayr.net » Cross platform live migration

vanayr.net » Cross platform live migration — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 17:23:28 +0000

[...] the down side, Mike DiPetrillo has a great writeup on why this may not be a good idea. [...]

By: RTFM Education » Blog Archive » Live Migrate Apples & Oranges - But is it a good idea?

Sun, 07 Dec 2008 22:09:53 +0000

[...] http://www.mikedipetrillo.com/mikedvirtualization/2008/11/amd-and-red-hat-demonstrate-crossplatform-... [...]

By: Mike DiPetrillo

Mike DiPetrillo — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 15:44:37 +0000

VMotion is more than just the rage – it’s a building block to a dynamic datacenter. Without the ability to move workloads around with no downtime you don’t get advanced technologies like:

- DRS which automatically balances workloads across the datacenter
- DPM which consolidates VMs at night or when they are underutilized and shuts off servers to reduce power
- AppSpeed which responds to defined business logic to repurpose the datacenter or app environment
- Etc

You do have a point that if you are looking at all of this then you are further along the virtualization adoption curve and thus you can probably afford similar servers. However, there are a lot of customers that may be switching from Intel to AMD or vice-versa and want to have the ability to migrate back and forth. For that reason alone vendors will continue to look at ways to possibly do this safely and reliably.

By: Louw

Louw — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 12:42:30 +0000

Why not just plan downtime like you would for patches and move the VM as needed and restart? I understand that online is all the rage, but if you are too cheap to get 2 VM clusters then you will have to do without vMotion and go the good ‘ol downtime route. You cant have your cake AND eat it without paying the ferreyman. (hope i didn;t confuse my metaphors too much there)

By: Mike DiPetrillo

Mike DiPetrillo — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 22:31:50 +0000

Travis,

The video linked at the top of this blog (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuhU6jJjpAQ) is the one were referring to. At the very beginning they talk about migration in heterogeneous environments. At 2:05 they show the VM running on the Intel host. They initiate a live migration and then at 4:20 show the VM running on the Shanghai server. The title of the video even states “Live Migration Across Vendor Platforms”. Lastly, at 4:20 in the video they clearly state that this is moving between systems.

I hope that helps clear up what we’re talking about.

By: Travis Phipps

Travis Phipps — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 18:55:51 +0000

Actually, if you’re referring to the same video I saw, they clearly stated that they were only moving VMs TO the new Shanghai AMD processor. They make it clear that it’s new functionality in Shanghai that enables them to perform these cross-processor migrations. They never say (or demonstrate) moving to an Intel processor.

The inference I made after watching this video was that AMD was choosing to emulate Intel specific CPU characteristics to make this possible. I understand that it could be misleading for those not paying close attention, but I believe the video was factually correct (even if based on a non/newly released CPU architecture).