VMware vSphere 5.5 vMotion on EMC VPLEX Metro

As the scope of virtualized infrastructure continues to grow beyond a traditional single physical site to geographically dispersed multi-site environments, the ability to vMotion transparently across large distances will be a critical requirement.

vMotion in vSphere 5.5 incorporates a number of performance enhancements that enable a seamless migration of even large virtual machines running enterprise workloads over a metro distance. In addition, vMotion in vSphere 5.5 offers support for EMC VPLEX Metro, which enables shared data access across metro distances.

A series of tests were conducted at VMware Performance labs, in cooperation with EMC, to characterize vMotion performance on a VMware vSphere 5.5 virtual infrastructure that was stretched across two geographically dispersed datacenters using EMC VPLEX Metro. 

This white paper describes the testing methodology, workloads used, and the performance results. In addition, it outlines the best practices to follow when using vMotion in a VPLEX Metro environment.