In a new head-to-head comparison published by independent technology assessment firm Principled Technologies, VMware vSphere once again trounces challenger Hyper-V by delivering superior speed, performance, and reliability for zero-downtime virtual machine migrations. Live VM migration is crucial for proactive maintenance on hypervisor hosts and for distributing workloads as demand shifts — optimizing for either performance or power savings. Once an exclusive feature of the industry-leading vSphere platform, live migration has become yet another casualty of the checkbox war — where a simple “yes” or “no” cannot sufficiently convey vital technological differences.
Microsoft may position Hyper-V Live Migration as good enough, but a side-by-side comparison clearly reveals that an imitation is never as good as the original. VMware vMotion continues to improve and vSphere 5 enjoys many new enhancements, including support for multiple 10GbE interfaces to increase bandwidth for migration traffic — complementing the well-proven ability to migrate up to 8 VMs at a time.
Hyper-V Live Migration, introduced two years ago after much delay, will evidently remain stagnant for quite some time to come. In fact, the shipping version of Hyper-V can still only accommodate a single migration at a time — whether a source or a destination. This leads to the somewhat disingenuous claim that Hyper-V supports up to 8 concurrent Live Migrations per [16-node] cluster!
Principled Technologies conducted migration testing in two different scenarios, providing objectivity to correct the inaccurate claims of parity between the platforms. In the first scenario, one host in a cluster is running 10 VMs and is put into maintenance mode. Comparing elapsed times to evacuate each hypervisor quantifies migration speed without conjecture. In the second scenario, a single busy VM is moved from one host to another. The elapsed time is considered, but more important is the performance impact to the application undergoing migration.
Take a look at the results and see for yourself: Read the rest of this entry »

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