How to make VMware vMotion work with Abiquo

Introduction

Abiquo supports vMotion with the capabilities and limitations described below.

Capabilities

• The events are detected properly independently of the polling interval, which only affects the state change detection velocity.
• False DESTROYED/CREATED events are detected (and not propagated) using VCenter to check if the virtual machine has vMotion or Relocation tasks in progress.
• Abiquo detects vMotion movements (virtual machines in power on)
• Abiquo detects Relocation movements (virtual machines in power off)
• In early tests, Abiquo detects movements produced by VMWare DRS because it properly manages the repeated names of virtual machines in the caches.

Limitations

• MOVED events are not propagated when the virtual machine is moved to a host not managed by Abiquo (it is not added to Abiquo and not monitored by the Monitor Manager/Virtual System Monitor) but it is managed by vCenter. The virtual machine will remain with the last known state. Then:
  
  • if the destination host is added to Abiquo, a MOVED event will be generated properly.
  • if the virtual machine goes back to the original host, its state will be updated.
• VMWare HA is not supported.
• Abiquo does not support movements between machines with different Network Service Types unless the machines are connected to a dvSwitch. You must configure the same network service type for source and destination machine network interfaces or you will not be able to use the moved VM in Abiquo.
  • dvSwitch :   Abiquo will only allow you to change the Network Service Type of a dvSwitch if there are no virtual machines deployed on any of the machines attached to that dvSwitch. 
• Storage vMotion to the same ESX host is supported since version 3.0
  • When you are performing a vMotion operation, vCenter asks if you want to migrate the datastore on which the VM is located. If you vMotion a VM to the same host and you just change the destination datastore, this will work in vCenter and Abiquo will detect it when it synchronizes the virtual machine definition. You can set the frequency of this check with the abiquo.vsm.vmsyncfrequency.vmx_04 property. See Abiquo Configuration Properties#vsm

vMotion Configuration Requirements

The following vMotion configuration requirements are explained below:

• Abiquo properties
• Shared datastore on VMWare
• Shared datastore enabled in Abiquo

Configuring Abiquo Properties for vMotion

In order to detect movements, the Monitor Manager requires the following Abiquo Configuration Properties for DvS and vCenter. Set these properties in the abiquo.properties file on the Remote Services machine.

• abiquo.dvs.vcenter.user
• abiquo.dvs.vcenter.password
• abiquo.vcenter.port.connection

Configuring iSCSI Shared Storage

On the storage device, check you have properly configured the initiator group to include each ESX/ESXi, by adding the hypervisors' IQNs to the list.
Also remember to add the Abiquo IQN, which can be found at /etc/iscsi/initiatorname.iscsi

NetApp

For example, for NetApp, open the Filer WebUI at http://<Filer_IP>/na_admin/ then click the FilerView button.

Make changes under LUNs > Initiator Groups > Manage. In this case, the hypervisor and Abiquo IQNs should be part of abiGroup.

If you have previously used the NetApp storage with an ESX/ESXi host outside of Abiquo, the ESX/ESXi host's IQN will probably have been added to another initiator group. You will need to manually remove it from that group before you can use it in Abiquo. You can add it to abiGroup manually or Abiquo will add it automatically.

Configuring the Hypervisor to Use a Shared VMFS Datastore

In order to have vMotion® working with Abiquo you need to ensure that all the hypervisor hosts have a shared VMFS datastore.

To do this, first create a volume (that will be shared by all your ESX hypervisors) in your preferred storage system then add it to an ESX hypervisor using the static discovery method.

From the iSCSI Software Adapter properties window (shown above), click on the Static Discovery tab. Then click the Add button at the bottom of the window. Complete the dialog below with the server hostname or IP and the target IQN. The port should be the default, which is 3260.

Click OK and close the properties windows.
A message suggesting you rescan all the HBAs appears. Click Yes.

After the rescan you should see your volume(s) in the list of devices. Now format the volume with the VMFS file system. Simply add a datastore in the Configuration --> Storage window, then follow the instructions, selecting the volume recently created and you're done. On the other hypervisors you only need to add the volume with the static discovery and it will be automatically recognized as a new datastore.

Enabling the Shared Datastore in Abiquo

When adding the hypervisors to Abiquo make sure that the newly created shared datastore is visible and activated.