This is the first part in a multi-part series on the topic of Long-Distance vMotion. I am currently architecting and building this out for a few of my customers.
Long-Distance vMotion (LDVM) is the holy grail of business continuity – the ability to migrate workloads across data centers or in and out of clouds with no disruption of service and zero downtime. When I started consulting in the 1990s, after my several years as a software developer, I was a high availability clustering consultant, among other things. Later I architected geographic clusters, but one thing was certain, it was very expensive, complex in architecture and difficult to manage.
Long-Distance vMotion attempts to tackle one issue, that of business continuity. Let’s face it, disasters are rare. I know there are earthquakes, tornados, hurricanes, floods and other bad things that happen. In my many years of consulting, these have rarely happened to my customers. I have two customers that have had their storage ruined, each by their own fire suppression system failing and pouring water onto their equipment. These disasters, although rare, do happen. They must be planned for. It’s risk mitigation; a business decision that doesn’t come for free.
