User:Nicksousa/sandbox

vMotion and svMotion require the use of vCenter and ESXi hosts.

vMotion (Live Migration)
vMotion migrates a virtual machine (VM) from one ESXi host to another. This can be done with the VM being either powered on or powered off. If the VM is powered on, it will copy the contents of the VMs memory from the source to destination. Once the majority of the VMs memory is copied over to the destination ESXi host, a stun and resume command is run to finish transferring over the VM to the destination without any downtime.

svMotion (Storage vMotion)
svMotion enables live migration of virtual disks and their home directories without any downtime. svMotion uses a mirror driver to copy virtual hard drives and/or the home directory from the source to destination datastores simultaneously, which keeps everything in sync until the svMotion operation is complete on the destination, at which point the source data is deleted.

There is a performance impact from running svMotion – read IO from the source and write IO on the destination. This can be verified through esxtop. If VAAI is enabled on the ESXi hosts and on the storage array, it will offload the svMotion migration operation to the array instead of going through the VMkernel, which increases the migration speed.