vmware’s vmotion is so damn cool

vmware’s vmotion is fuckin’ awesome, period. i guess i should explain.

at work, we have a pair of hp dl365’s running vmware esx while we’re getting familiar with it. let’s call them “esx-1″ and “esx-2″. neither are really considered “production” at this point. esx-1 and esx-2 each have a single gigabit ethernet connection into our core switch. the two ports were each members of one vlan and 802.1q was not being used. we needed to change that.

my co-worker, let’s call him keith, is the guy who handles most of the vmware stuff. i’m the network guy. thursday afternoon, while we were both in the office, he vmotion’d all the virtual machines over to esx-1. he did whatever it was he needed to do on the vmware side so that we could use 802.1q (vlan tagging) on esx-1 and i immediately made the required changes on the core switch. a quick check let us know that everything was good. he vmotion’d a few of the vm’s back over to esx-2 (we like to spread things out a bit).

esx-1 needed a few patches installed, so he eventually vmotion’d everything over to esx-2, put esx-1 in maintenance mode, installed the patches, and moved a few vm’s back to esx-1.

today, we decided we’d go ahead and make the changes so that we could use 802.1q on esx-1. this time, however, keith was at his house, i was at mine, and the esx servers were in the datacenter. no big deal.

i was connected in through an f5 firepass ssl vpn while keith was connected in through a rhel 4 server running ssl-explorer. the rhel server just happens to be in a virtual machine running on the esx machines. again, no big deal.

keith, while connected through ssl-explorer, made the necessary changes to vmware (i have no idea what he actually has to do) and let me know (we were “talking” via our internal jabber server) that he was ready. i was already connected into the core switch so i changed the vlan membership of the port that esx-1 was connected to. verified i could still ping esx-1 and let keith know i was done. he checked and everything looked good.

keith decided to vmotion the ssl-explorer virtual machine back over to esx-1 — remember that this was the server he was going through to vpn into the network. vmotion, of course, is fast as shit. i opened another terminal and started pinging the ssl-explorer server. keith started the vmotion and i was able to identify when the move actually took place — i missed one ping reply.

after that, the ssl-explorer server was back on esx-1, happily doing it’s job. i got an “i’m still here” instant message from keith and we were good to go.

now how damn cool is that? =)