Community  Discussions  Virtualization: Storage Live Migration

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Virtualization: Storage Live Migration

Latest response October 30 2020 at 12:24 AM

Why do we need Storage Live Migration?

VMware Storage VMotion has set the standard for storage live migration, and we need to support this feature both in RHEL/KVM and RHEV. It is not
just a checkbox, but a major feature that KVM needs to support. Storage Live Migration will be used in data-center virtualization, significantly
enhancing capital and operational efficiency.

How does it work?

Storage Live Migration enables live migration of virtual machine disk files across storage disks and arrays. This feature allows a customer to relocate
virtual machine disk files between and across shared storage locations while maintaining continuous service availability and data integrity. The live
block copy feature allows an image backing a
guest disk to be copied while the guest is online. The streaming feature allows the guest to start execution while the parent image reside remotely
(with/without shared storage).

Where is it supported?
The Storage Live Migration feature will be supported in RHEL/KVM, and libvirt will provide the necessary feature set for competing with VMware
Storage VMotion. Storage Live Migration will be used by Red Hat virtualization customers as part of an end-to-end virtualization solution that is
designed to enable pervasive data-center virtualization.

Please comment how important this feature is for you, for your use case.

Started July 21 2011 at 2:03 AM by

Bhavna Sarathy Active Contributor 360 Points

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Responses
22 July 2011 5:28 AM

ir. Jan Gerrit Kootstra  Community Leader

GURU Hello Bhavna Sarathy,

11215
Points Without this feature I do not see VMware being replaced in many datacenters.

So I guess it is a very important feature.

Kind regards,
 Jan Gerrit Kootstra

24 July 2011 2:05 AM

Phil Jensen  Community Leader

GURU I work with a several thousand VM virtualization environment and Storage Live Migration is absolutely a useful feature--it is a key
3262 product differentiator (KPD) at the moment and KVM adopting the feature would be a big win.
Points

25 July 2011 3:54 PM

Bhavna Sarathy
RED HAT
Phil, thanks for response, and it would be great to hear some details regarding your environment.  Would you mind sharing some
ACTIVE
CONTRIBUTOR details?  I want to be sure we architect and implement to match your use case, and others out there.    We should be targetting the big
360 data centers.
Points
 

Regards,

Bhavna

4 August 2011 3:58 PM

Phil Jensen  Community Leader

GURU Hi Bhavna,
3262 We use VMware predominantly at the moment, supporting clusters of MTAs, archiving servers and mail stores. We rely mostly on local
Points storage, but use Storage vMotion as necessary when we need to migrate data from one host to another. Our primary use case would be
on-demand migration of virtual machines to support balancing workloads.

Phil

25 July 2011 3:48 PM

Bhavna Sarathy
RED HAT
Jan, thanks for response.   We are looking at this feature as a "must have" as well.   Would you mind sharing some details regarding your
ACTIVE
CONTRIBUTOR current data center environment?   We want to be sure we architect and implement to match multiple use cases.
360
Points
 

Regards,

Bhavna

28 July 2011 12:17 PM

ir. Jan Gerrit Kootstra  Community Leader

GURU Bhava,
11215
Points  

I work in a multiple vendor environment. We service from Linux on x86 until z\OS on mainframe.

Details cannot be providing more details online.

Please contact your Dutch office, they know more about the company I work for.

 
  

Kind regards,

Jan Gerrit Kootstra

26 July 2011 9:25 PM

JC Jeff Chapman

COMMUNITY I have the same concerns and hopes as the previous posts.
MEMBER

53 Points

27 July 2011 1:26 AM

SA Syamsul Anuar

COMMUNITY As we try to push RHEV to customers, storage live migration is one of the most asked question nowadays (It was P2V before, but not
MEMBER
anymore - thanks to Acronis). We approached a big GLC in my country and as much as they like RHEV (we are in the POC stage right
94 Points
now), the features that get ask the most is Storage Live Migration. Although most customers dont use it in VMware environment (at
least in my customer demographic), this GLC is a big user of Storage VMotion from VMware. 

This feature sometime is a make or break for some big customers. And in order for RHEV to penetrate to major accounts and replacing
VMware as a serious alternatives, this must come in ASAP.

27 July 2011 7:18 AM

FV Fred van Zwieten

ACTIVE Without good storage management features like Storage vmotion RHEV has a big challenge competing VMware, so it's a +1 from me. As
CONTRIBUTOR
for use case, well, that's kind of obvious. If you have vm's living on different datastores the need to move them between datastores
323
Points
automatically arises. Within an enterprise environment an obvious consequence of this is that we want to do this without shutting down
the vm.

28 July 2011 8:26 AM

GC George Christodoulou

COMMUNITY I do agree with with the Storage Live Migration feature stated above. It should be a must.
MEMBER

25 Points  

I would also like to share some comments by one of our customers during a PoC of RHEV:

1. Inability to use an existing virtual disk to another guest

2. Need to shutdown guests in order to take snapshots
3. Inability to extend the size of a virtual disk
4. Inability to increase the size of a Data Storage
5. The way “snapcloning” is done requires double the disk space required
6. Inability to use Physical SAN disks on a guest

I believe the above features should also be considered.

30 August 2011 6:27 PM

VS Vincent Seneker

COMMUNITY The points made in this post are the same things that we get asked when we discuss RHEV with other agencies.  They all use VMWare,
MEMBER
and they consider RHEV to not be fully Enterprise ready without the majority of the features listed here.  Granted, RHEV is a younger
75 Points
product, but some resources should be devoted to knocking out at least two of these points for the near feature.
 20 December 2012 4:00 PM
BK Brian Kerhin

ACTIVE I have used physical San disks on kvm, just share and mount them with iSCSI. Works great, full redhat support.
CONTRIBUTOR

202 BK
Points

4 August 2011 2:28 PM

Bhavna Sarathy
RED HAT
Thanks for all the feedback on this thread.   Having to shutdown guests to take a snapshot is not seen kindly by customers.   Live
ACTIVE
CONTRIBUTOR snapshots will be supported by the end of this year.   Storage live migration is an important feature we are trying to implement in KVM
360 soon.  Definitely based on the feedback from this group, it's clear that we need to push this feature out in our Virtualization portfolio
Points ASAP.

30 August 2011 7:40 PM

DH Don Hoover

ACTIVE As far as I know this is now marginally possible in KVM via qemu-kvm 0.12 and higher.  This feature looks to be in active development for KVM.
CONTRIBUTOR

184 Points  

http://www.linux-kvm.com/content/qemu-kvm-012-adds-block-migration-feature

12 September 2011 9:39 PM

Phil Jensen  Community Leader

GURU This is wonderful news. Thanks for the link.

3262
Points

20 December 2012 6:13 AM

BK Brian Kerhin

ACTIVE I'd love to see this and have an API available so great file systems like zfs (the ZfsOnLinux (ZOL) team is FANTASTIC) and brtfs, etc
CONTRIBUTOR
could use snapshot migration to make the process really smooth.
202
Points
I'd like the same kind of API available for the new vss snapshot feature so zfs can use it's snapshots for that, the ZOL team has clearly
communicated to me they would look at implementing it.

http://www.google.com/url?
sa=t&rct=j&q=kvm%20snapshot%20vss&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CDQQFjAA&url=https%3A%2F%2Fevents.linuxfoundation.org%2Fslides%
japan%2Flcj2011_sorensen.pdf&ei=CqzSUN-7CYjDrQGV04HADg&usg=AFQjCNHgvX5gUmO2kXaSEJYn-
Jmu_zD2CA&bvm=bv.1355534169,d.aWM&cad=rja

We've moved from Hyper-V to KVM (dispite 2012 now supporting live migration, but we also have ZFS under ALL our data so moving
from system A to be right now only takes the time for 1 reboot. It's be great to make that 0 down time :).

BK

15 June 2020 7:15 AM

MR Michael Jordan Reyes

COMMUNITY Hi, I just want to check if this is already applied to RHEL + KVM? We are looking for a type 2 hypervisor that can avoid the operation
MEMBER
downtime for planned storage maintenance by transferring live virtual machine disk files across the storage arrays
35 Points

29 October 2020 11:03 PM

 Mark Salter
MS Storage vmotion is a requirement for our environment, currently on VMware, looking to move to OpenStack, however this could be a
COMMUNITY
deal breaker as it is a function we do monthly to balance storage workloads and capacity between our many SANs, not to mention
MEMBER
moving storage off a SAN when decommissioning it. Please confirm if live svmotion is implemented yet in Ussuri on RHEL 8.2.
25 Points

30 October 2020 12:24 AM

RJ Hinton  Community Leader

GURU Mark Salter, for the impact of this matter, I highly recommend you please put in a case with Red Hat directly.
16097
Points Regards,
RJ

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