How to make VMware vMotion work with Abiquo

Introduction

When you add vCenter hosts to Abiquo, Abiquo supports vMotion with the functionality and limitations described here. 

vMotion functionality supported by Abiquo for vCenter hosts:

• 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 VM has vMotion or Relocation tasks in progress.
• Abiquo detects vMotion movements (VMs in power on)
• Abiquo detects Relocation movements (VMs in power off)
• Abiquo detects movements produced by VMware DRS (and it properly manages the repeated names of virtual machines in the caches
• Abiquo supports vMotion between different versions of ESXi

Limitations of vMotion in Abiquo

• MOVED events are not propagated when the VM is moved to a host in vCenter that is not managed by Abiquo. The VM 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 VM goes back to the original host, its state will be updated.
• Abiquo supports movements between machines with different Network Service Types if the machines are connected to a dvSwitch. 
  • dvSwitch :  Abiquo will only allow you to change the Network Service Type of a dvSwitch if there are no VMs deployed on any of the hosts attached to that dvSwitch. 
• Abiquo supports Storage vMotion to the same ESXi host
  • 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 VM definition. You can set the frequency of this check with the abiquo.vsm.vmsyncfrequency.vmx_04 property. See Abiquo Configuration Properties#vsm

vMotion requires the following configuration as explained below:

• Shared datastore on VMware
• Shared datastore enabled in the platform

Configure a shared VMFS datastore

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

1. Create a volume (that will be shared by all your ESXi hypervisors) in your preferred storage system
2. Add it to an ESXi hypervisor using the static discovery method. From the iSCSI Software Adapter properties window, go to Static Discovery. Then click the Add button. 
3. Complete the dialog with the server hostname or IP and the target IQN. The port should be the default, which is 3260.
4. Click OK and close the properties windows.
5. If 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. 
6. Format the volume with the VMFS file system. 
7. Add the volume as a datastore. Go to Configuration → Storage, then follow the instructions, and select the recently created volume. 
8. On the other hypervisors, add the volume with the static discovery and it will be automatically recognized as a new datastore.

When adding your hypervisors to Abiquo, check that the newly created shared datastore is visible, and enable it.