F5, VMware to ease live data centre migration

BANGALORE, INDIA: F5 Networks  Inc., a provider of application delivery networking (ADN), 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 for VMware vSphere 4 environments in a secure, accelerated manner.

Also Read: Cloud computing: The NextGen ADN platform

The integrated solution ease migration live applications across geographically dispersed data centres.

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 centres.

Long distance virtual machine migration across distributed data centres 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 centre. This process could require significant downtime.

Moreover, once the virtual machine was back online at the new data centre, 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.

This new solution mitigates the impact of migrating virtual machines across long distances, allowing live migration and automatic redirection of sessions. Thus making the experience seamless to users.

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 WOM encrypts and compresses data between BIG-IP devices, extending the effective distances of migrations and decreasing replication time for offline transfers.

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.