Shared Nothing Live Migration

Shared Nothing Live Migration is a Hyper-V 3.0 feature that help us live migrate virtual machines from one Hyper-V server to another without a shared storage and cluster membership.

 

Note : Failover clustering provides HA, but shared nothing live migration is a mobility solution that gives flexibility in a planned movement of VMs between Hyper-V hosts without downtime.

Hyper-V settings for Live migrations 

As a prerequisite for this, we need to standardize network connectivity on Hyper-V host machines (eg : vSwitches should have same names for VM traffic, iSCSI traffic etc). And for this shared nothing Live Migration traffic we can use a separate VLAN (say, VLAN 90) so that it won’t affect local LAN.

Separate VLAN for live migration traffic

Also we need to configure constrained delegation on Hyper-V servers to use Kerberos authentication protocol when managing the servers remotely. This is shown below.

Use Kerberos



Delegation to specified services

 

Best practice recommendations for iSCSI network adapters

Best practice recommendations for iSCSI network adapters

Note : all those settings are enabled by default, we need to disable it as best practice on all iSCSI NICs

Also, if your network/ network devices supports jumbo frames, then that should be enabled too on the network adapters.

Recommended BIOS settings for DELL PowerEdge 12G servers

BIOS settings for optimal performance

Memory mode : Optimizer
Node interleave : Disabled
Logical processor : Enabled
QPI frequency : Maximum frequency
CPU power management : Maximum performance
Turbo boost : Enabled
C1E : Disabled
C-states : Disabled
Memory frequency : Maximum performance

RAID configuration using PERC

PERC stands for PowerEdge Raid Controller. Here we have 3 physical disks present. We will be configuring 2 virtual disks (VD) of RAID 5 using these 3 physical disks.

VD00 - 100 GB

VD01 - 1.7 TB

Once the system starts press Ctrl+R to enter PERC configuration utility and follow the steps as shown below.

No configuration present and 3 disks available

Press F2 and create new VD

VD00 properties

Click OK

VD00 - 100 GB created

Press F2 and add new VD

VD01 properties

VD00 and VD01 created

 Now we have successfully created 2 VDs. Next step is to initialize both VDs.

Initialization of VD00

Start Init

Click OK

Initialization VD00 in progress

Similarly initialize the next VD too. Once its completed you can exit from the PERC utility and reboot the machine.