Enhanced Storage vMotion in vSphere 5 with Mirror Mode

Posted on July 13, 2011 by PiroNet

This is a short post for those who are interested in deep technical details of one of the master architecture pieces introduced in the Enhanced Storage vMotion available in vSphere 5 Ent and Ent+ called Mirror Mode aka IO Mirroring. You can hear about the term in the Profile-Driven Storage video and the Storage DRS video. Mirror Mode can leverage VAAI and enable the use of copy off-load engines sometimes present in storage arrays making it even more appealing.

You can deep dive into Mirror Mode and the other available architectures by reading the The Design and Evolution of Live Storage Migration in VMware ESX written by Ali Mashtizadeh, Emre Celebi, Tal Garfinkel and Min Cai all from VMware.

We describe the evolution of live storage migration in VMware ESX through three separate architectures, and explore the performance, complexity and functionality trade-offs of each.

About PiroNet

Didier Pironet is an independent blogger and freelancer with +15 years of IT industry experience. Didier is also a former VMware inc. employee where he specialised in Datacenter and Cloud Infrastructure products as well as Infrastructure, Operations and IT Business Management products. Didier is passionate about technologies and he is found to be a creative and a visionary thinker, expressing with passion and excitement, hopefully inspiring and enrolling people to innovation and change.
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3 Responses to Enhanced Storage vMotion in vSphere 5 with Mirror Mode

  1. Pingback: Welcome to vSphere-land! » vSphere 5 Links

  2. omnicuriousme says:
    August 8, 2011 at 10:10

    Thank you very much for the post, Didier! I especially enjoyed the link to the Live Storage Migration paper–the high efficiency 91.3% of the new IO Mirroring sounds real exciting.
    Btw, you have helped me before on the QNAP forum where I post as: “wgillick”. I’ve become highly interested in the storage needs of VMware and other virtualization platforms, so it’s great to get to know you.

    Regards,
    Will

    Reply

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