Aidan Finn, upstanding Irishman, apparent bear-cub puncher, hobbyist photog, MVP all-star and one of my favorite Hyper-V bloggers (seriously, he’s good, and along with DidierV & the Hyper-Dutchman has probably saved my vAss more times than I can vCount) appeared on one of my favorite podcasts last week, RunAs Radio with Canuck Richard Campbell.
Which is all sorts of awesome as these are a few of my favorite things piled on top of each other (Finn on RunAs).
The subject? Hyper-V, scale out file servers (SoFS) in 2012 R2, SMB 3.0 multichannel and Microsoft storage networking, which are just about my favoritest subjects in the whole wide world. I mean what are the odds that one of my favorite Hyper-V bloggers would appear on one of my favorite tech podcasts? Remote. And talk about storage networking tech, Redmond-style, during that podcast?
All that and an adorable Irish brogue?
This is Instant nerdgasm territory here people; if you’re into these black arts as I am, it’s a must-listen.
Anyway, Finn reminded me of his famous powershell demos in which he demonstrates all the options we Hyper-V admins have at our disposal now when it comes to Live Migrating VMs from host to host.
And believe me, we have so many now it’s almost embarrassing, especially if you cut your teeth on Hyper-V 2.0 in 2008 R2, where successfully Live Migrating VMs off a host (or draining one during production) involved a few right clicks, chicken sacrifice, Earth-Jupiter-Moon alignment, a reliable Geiger counter by your side and a tolerance for Pucker Factor Values greater than 10* **.
Nowadays, we can:
- Live Migrate VMs between hosts in a cluster (.vhdx parked in a Cluster Shared Volume, VM config, RAM & CPU on a host….block storage, the Coke Classic option)
- Live Migrate VMs parked on SMB 3.0 shares, just like you NFS jockeys do
- Shared-nothing Live Migration, either storage + VM, just storage, or just VM!
- A for instance: from my Dell Latitude i7 ultrabook with Windows 8.1 and client hyper-v installed (natch), I can storage Live Migrate a .vhdx off my skinny but fast 256GB SSD to a spacious SMB share at work, then drop it back on my laptop at the end of the day, all via Scheduled Task or powershell with no downtime for the VM
- With Server 2012/2012 R2 you get all those options + SMB 3.0 multichannel
Not only that, but we have some cool new toys with which to make the cost of Live Migration a VM to the host with the most a little less painful:
- Standard TCP/IP : I like this because I’m old school and anything that stresses the network and LACP is fun because it makes the network guy sweat
- Compression: Borrow spare cycles from the host CPU, compress the VM’s RAM, and Live Migrate your way out of a tight spot
- SMB via Remote Direct Memory Access : the holy of holies in Live Migration. As Finn points out, this bit of tech can scale beyond the bandwidth capabilities of the PCIe 3 bus. SMB 3.0 + RDMA makes you hate your Northbridge
Finn*** of course provided some Live Migration start:finish times resulting from the various methods above, which I then, of course, interpreted as Finn daring me personally over the radio to try and beat those times in my humble Daisetta Lab.
Now this is just for fun people; not a Labworks-style list of repeatable results, so let’s not nerd-out on how my testing methodology isn’t sound & I’m a stupidhead, ok?
Anyway, Sysinternals has a nice little tool to redline the RAM in your Windows VM. I don’t know how Finn does it, but I don’t have workloads (yet!) in the Lab that would fill 4GB of RAM with non-random data on a VM, so off to the cmd we go:
You type this (haven’t played with all the switches yet) in this navy blue screen:
And then this happen and the somewhat pink graph goes full pink:
Then we press this button to test Live Migration w/ compression, as the Daisetta Lab doesn’t have fancy RDMA NICs like certain well-connected Irish Hyper-V bloggers:
Which makes this blue celeste denim Azure colored line get all spikey:
all of which results in a wicked-fast Live Migrations & really cool orange-colored charts in my totally non-random, non-scientific but highly enjoyable laboratory experiment
Still, in the end, I like my TCP/IP uncompressed Live Migrations because 1) sackcloth & ashes, and 2) I didn’t go to the trouble of building a multiplexed LACP team -with a virtual switch on top!- just to let the Cat5es in my attic have an easy day at the office:
But at work: yes. I love this compression stuff and echo Finn’s observations on how Hyper-V doesn’t slam your host CPUs beyond what the host & its VM fleet could bear.
Anyway, did I beat Finn’s Live Migration times in this fun little test? Will the Irish MVP have to admit he’s not so esteemed after all and surrender his Hyper_V_MVP_badge.gif to me?
Of course I did and yes he will.
But not really.
[table caption=”Daisetta Lab LM vs Finn’s Powershell LM Scripts – 4GB VM” width=”500″ colwidth=”20|100|50″ colalign=”left|left|left|left|left”]
Who,TCP/IP LM,Compressed LM,RDMA & SMB 3 LM,Notes
Finn,78 seconds, 15 seconds,6.8 seconds, “Mr. I once moved a VM with 56GB of RAM in 35 seconds probably has a few Xeons”
D-Lab,38 seconds,Like 12 or something,Who’s ass do I need to kiss to get RDMA/iWarp?, But seriously my VM RAM was probably not random
[/table]
Finn notes in his posts that he’s dedicating an entire 1GbE NIC for his Live Migration Demos, wheras I’m embracing the converged switch model and haven’t even played with bandwidth or QOS settings on my Hyper-V switch.
How do my VMware colleagues & friends measure this stuff & think about vMotion performance & reliability? I know NFS can scale & perform, but am ignorant on the nuances of v3 vs v4, how it works on the host and Distributed vSwitch and your “Shared nothing” storage vMotion. And what’s this I hear that vSphere won’t begin a vMotion without knowing it will complete? How’s that determined?
I mean I could spend an hour or two googling it, or you could, I don’t know, post a comment and save me the time and spread some of your knowledge 😀
I’m jazzed about SMB 3.0, but there are only a handful of storage vendors who have support for the new stack, and among them, as Finn points out, Microsoft is #1 storage vendor for SMB 3 fans, with NetApp probably in 2nd place.
* Just kidding, it wasn’t that bad. Most days.
** Pucker Factor Value can be measured by querying obscure wmi class win32_pfv
*** Finn is a consultant. So you can hire him. I have no relationship with him other than admiration for his scripting skillz
Wilson.tech 
Serious LOLs.
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