Live Migration Comparison over TCP/IP, Compression, and SMB MultiChannel with Hyper-V

2 Min. Read

Hello Folks,

Need for speed? Well I have two Hyper-V beast clustered running on top of HPE 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:

LVM_TCPIP

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?

Compression

LVM_Compression

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?

SMBMultiChannel

LVM_SMB01

LVM_SMB02

What I observed during my test that:

  • TCP/IP: The network is using 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?

LVM_Comparison

Enjoy your weekend!

Cheers,

__
Thank you for reading our blog.

Please let us know in the comments section below if you have any questions or feedback.

-Charbel Nemnom-

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