F5 Networks, Inc., the global leader in Application Delivery Networking (ADN), has announced deployment guidance and test results that illustrate and validate the value of deploying F5 and VMware solutions in concert to extend live migration capabilities across long distances.

Building on the previous announcement and demo at VMworld 2009, these test results confirm that organizations can securely migrate live, virtualized web applications—and their associated storage—between data centers thousands of miles apart without downtime or user disruption using F5 and VMware products available now.

Details
VMware VMotion is deployed in production by a significant number of VMware customers to migrate virtual machines and data. The joint F5 and VMware solution helps solve latency, bandwidth, and packet loss issues, which historically have prevented customers from performing live migrations between data centers. Long distance virtual machine migration across distributed data centers typically required the operator to halt online sessions, suspend the image, migrate the image to the new data center, and then bring the virtual machine back online at the new data center. This process could require significant downtime. Moreover, once the virtual machine was back online at the new data center, clients with previously established sessions would still be unable to access the migrated application until they received an updated DNS record aligning with the new location.

A flexible Application Delivery Network is the fundamental component required to extend live migration capabilities beyond a single data center. There are two key ADN components to the new solution:
    * BIG-IP WAN Optimization Module (WOM) secures and accelerates VMware VMotion and VMware Storage VMotion traffic up to 10x when compared to attempting long distance live migration without the solution—even over links that are subject to bandwidth, latency, or packet-loss issues.
    * BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) and BIG-IP Global Traffic Manager (GTM) enable local and global redirection of established and new web application sessions before and after the migration. This overcomes many of the networking hurdles that previously prevented organizations from migrating live applications between data centers.

Availability
F5’s step-by-step solution deployment guide for long distance live migrations performed with VMware VMotion can be downloaded from f5.com. All products integrated within the joint solution are available from F5 and VMware, respectively.

AVinder Batra/ITVoir Network