GTM/LTM/VMware cloud migration demo

Minimally, you would need GTM and LTM. The LTMs would need to be running V10 to take advantage of iSessions. Not sure about the VMWare side.

This was an initial demonstration illustrating how F5 helps solve and enable cloud computing challenges and app mobility with VMware -- there is more to come, including full solution documentation and details soon. For now, you can check out the white paper at http://www.f5.com/pdf/white-papers/cloud-vmotion-f5-wp.pdf -- hopefully that will provide a bit more insight.

Any updates or progress on this front would be great (sorry I know it's coming but any ideas on dates ??)....

 

 

This seems to be an area that is lacking in the HA/DR VMware solution (for Data Center to Data Center redundancy).

 

 

Any distance limitations (ie requires sync SAN replication, Database driven sites etc.) ??

 

 

-P

There is a new Deployment Guide on this topic that has been written and is undergoing the editing process. I am reviewing revision 6 of the guide now but am unsure how many more revisions there will be until the guide is finalized and published.

I have a copy of the guide but it doesn't feature any IP addressing schematics and is virtually useless! Any network diagrams you have would be useful.

 

 

Thanks.

Chris - are you referring to the final guide, published here:

 

 

http://www.f5.com/pdf/deployment-guides/vmware-vmotion-dg.pdf

 

 

There is also a detailed (new) video and blog posted here:

 

 

http://devcentral.f5.com/weblogs/nojan/archive/2010/02/02/introducing-long-distance-vmotion-with-vmware.aspx

 

 

It includes architecture diagrams, and discusses several approaches to the overal deployment (which approach is best will always depend on your particular environment and goals). If this IS the guide you've already seen, and you would like to go into more details, let us know and we can set something up with a local F5er.

Hi Charlie,

 

 

Yes that's the guide that I have, just watched the video and it doesn't help much either. I work for an F5/VMware reseller in the UK and we have been trying to get this set up exactly as you guys have for our demo lab with no joy. I would be keen to speak to someone at F5 who has this working if you could provide a contact.

 

 

Chris - we can get you hooked up with a local expert in EMEA to help you put it together. Can you email me offline at p.delamotte@f5.com? Thanks

For the record. I have set up everything following deployment guide and everything seems to work quite well.

 

My only problem is that within vcenter I cannot migrate two guests which are not grouped in the same datacenter.

 

I have independant LTM's and NFS storage and esx infrastructure simulating two datacenters, so I can technically migrate storage across the isession, and migrate the machine across the isession to the other data center.

 

Is there a way to tell vcenter, that its ok to migrate to esx hosts which are defined as being grouped in a different data-center ?

Hi, this is excellent feedback. The datacenter issue is a known one, and probably one worth adding more clearly to the guide. It makes logical sense (of course!) to have the VMs in different datacenters, but that's not how vCenter works today. It's feedback we will work with VMware on as well. So, for now, they do have to be part of the same datacenter, which is confusing.

 

 

One way to manage all this is using VMWare Orchestrator, which, although it's amazingly complicated to setup (mostly because of its LDAP requirement), makes automating and keeping track of where VMs are a little more manageable.

 

 

What you would like, however, to migrate between datacenters, is not something I've been able to get to work. Because this keeps coming up, I'll look into it some more.