Hello Folks,
Need for speed? Well I have two Hyper-V beast clustered running on top of HP Proliant DL380p Gen8 servers with the following specs:
- 2 Sockets, 8 Cores each @ 2.69GHz = 32 Logical processors
- 8 X 1 Gbps NICs (leveraging Hyper-V Converged Network with Network teaming and QoS)
- 256GB RAM
- 2 X 400GB SSD Enterprise Mainstream
Where is the bottleneck in above specs? Sure enough the network bandwidth, we have only 8Gbps network pipe no 10GbE nor RDMA NICs :(
In order to measure the Live Migration speeds between different types of migration, I wrote a PowerShell script inspired by Ben Hyper-V Program Manager what he did in TechEd in the demo that does the following:
-
- Configure the cluster to use 1 GbE team for Live Migration with TCP/IP
- Live migrate a VM (time measured)
-
- Configure the cluster to use 1 GbE team for Live Migration with Compression
- Live migrate a VM (time measured)
-
- Configure the cluster to use two 1 GbE NICs @ 2Gbps with SMB Multichannel Live Migration
- Live migrate a VM (time measured)
-
- Configure the cluster to use 1 GbE team for Live Migration with Compression again to Live Migrate the VM back to the original Node
- Live migrate a VM (time measured)
Let’s get started…
1- Live Migrating a Virtual Machine with 8GB static RAM from WS2012 R2 to WS2012 R2 with TCP/IP:
2- Live Migrating a Virtual Machine with 8GB static RAM from WS2012 R2 to WS2012 R2 with Compression
What is happening during the compression Live Migration?
3- Live Migrating a Virtual Machine with 8GB static RAM from WS2012 R2 to WS2012 R2 with SMB MultiChannel 2X1Gbps :)
What is happening during the SMB Live Migration?
What I observed during my test that:
- TCP/IP: The network is used about 95% of 1 GbE NIC, the pipe is saturated during the migration with low CPU utilization @ 2%.
- Compression: The network is used about 95% of 1 GbE NIC, the pipe is saturated during the migration, but the CPU utilization is higher now (as expected) @ 25% to 33%, but remember that Live Migration will switch to TCP/IP if compression is competing for resources with the host and Virtual Machines.
- SMB Multichannel: Nearly 2 Gbps network throughput over the two standard NICs. SMB is the future :)
And the time taken for each Live Migration? 
Enjoy your weekend!
Cheers,
Charbel
