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Comment by wesapien | Hacker News Reader

vMotion is about host failure. If a blade server dies, the vms can be spun up on another blade. Storage is same.

You're thinking of high-availability, which registers the vmx file of the VM to a physical server that isn't dead, then powers the VM back on. Whereas vMotion is either a cold or live-migration of the VM + memory state (if the VM is powered down, there is no memory state to migrate).

It's been awhile since I tested this but I had played around this on Cisco 5108 blade servers. We'd test vMotion by pulling out blades during testing to see the VM migrated. Isn't that what vMotion is for.

> vMotion is about host failure

No? It's also about load balancing and draining compute/storage resources in preparation for maintenance.

Most pertinently: as long as your alternative doesn't cover any vMotion use-cases, customers will remain 'in talks' with Broadcom...

Fun that people -still- don't understand the feature set that VMware provides.

He/She is thinking about VMware Fault Tolerance

I haven't worked on these systems for a long time. As I mentioned to another user, during testing, we'd pull out server blades to see if this mechanism works. The blades would be connected to the same storage array. Even this VMware website says "vSphere vMotion enables zero-downtime, live migration of workloads from one server to another so your users can continue to access the systems they need to stay productive." https://www.vmware.com/products/cloud-infrastructure/vsphere...

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