Someone on Twitter the other day quoted Paul Maritz, CEO of VMware, as stating that at any given time, there are more VMs in flight than there are aircraft-- and that alone describes just how heavily vMotion is used in VMware environments.

It's the most used feature in VMware environments by a LARGE margin, and for good reason. And now with the release of vSphere 5, VMware has made our favorite feature even better.

vMotion can now use multiple network adapters to increase the speed in which VMs are migrated. The vmkernel transparently balances the load across your available vMotion NICs-- even if you're only performing a single vMotion. VMware's internal testing showed migration times had an improvement of roughly 30-40%.

Also helping with the speed of migrations, and helping to eliminate failed vMotions, is a new "Stun During Page Send" (SDPS). What this feature essentially does is temporarily slow down the speed in which a VM is modifying pages in memory to allow a vMotion task to copy the contents of memory iteratively

&nbsp;

Next, "Metro vMotion" now supports vMotions across networks with up to 10ms of round trip latency, as compared to up to 5 ms of round trip latency in vSphere 4.1. This extends the capability to move machines between geographically disparate data centers-- though 10ms of latency usually indicates the sites are still pretty close to each other.

&nbsp;