A little behind, but better late than never. In my last post I covered the basic layout of VMware in modern terms.

Clustering in a VMware environment provides us with a number of benefits. The first of course is high availability. High availability simply put means if one host server dies, the virtual machines on that host are restarted on another host. This is excellent as it allows us to minimize downtime. Of course this feature in addition to a majority of the other excellent features in VMware require shared storage, but that is a post for another day.

If we can tolerate zero downtime, we can use the additional feature, Fault Tolerance. This enables us to have two virtual machines running in a master/slave configuration so if one dies the other picks up where it left off with no downtime. This is nice but it comes with a number of limitations and at significant cost since it doubles the number of virtual machines in use and thus the amount of resources required.

One of the coolest tricks, in my opinion, about VMware though is vMotion. We can actually take a live virtual machine, and move it between physical hosts without interruption, provided we have properly configured our network. This is excellent because it allows us to automate this process to keep the physical hosts balanced by moving live virtual machines around to ensure no one host is overloaded.

Taking it yet a step further, we often have multiple datastores in VMware. This is done to reduce contention on the file systems since we are seeing larger and larger deployments, with more and more virtual machines. Storage vMotion allows us to move the disk of the virtual machine between datastores. With the release of vSphere 5 we can now even automate this portion through clustered datastores, but that is again a topic for another day.

Migrating a virtual machine whether the live state, or the virtual disks is as simple as either dragging the virtual machine to a new host, or right clicking the virtual machine and selecting migrate.

Next post I plan to cover a little on the storage side, about how we configure datastores, and hopefully demystify why we chose different protocols in a VMware environment.