I was looking for a live video demonstration of the new and improved vMotion in vSphere 5.1 the other day but could not come across one at the time. I therefore decided to get it set up in my lab and record a demo of the new vMotion in action.
This improved version of vMotion doesn’t really have a new name, but some people are calling it: Enhanced vMotion, x-vMotion, or “shared nothing” vMotion amongst other names. I am happy to just call it vMotion for now, with the knowledge that it can now live migrate (powered on) VMs across from local storage on hosts (non-shared) to other hosts with shared or local storage.
You can initiate the migration using the vSphere Web Client. Here is a live demo I recorded using my home lab system with two 1Gbit vMotion interfaces. The VM is small for demo purposes – just 512MB RAM and a very small virtual disk. It was powered up for this demo.
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95_TWepFMgA
The background music for this demo is licensed as per the following link: