Storage vMotion possible for Virtual Lab?

[ASG]

Hi,

we are using Virtual Lab / On-Demand Sandbox for several tests. However the Performance is waaaaay below the expectation. For most cases this doesn't matter, but I'll have to test a huge modification with a DB-Server containing several hundreds Gigabyte affected.

Since our Lab has a Storage that contains the redo logs and has plenty of space: Is it possible to storage vmotion the running Virtual Labs from the presented NFS Volume to the Storage to benefit from better I/O? Or is there any other way to improve I/O inside the LAB?

Thanks!
ASG

[Egor Yakovlev]

Hi Asg,
- you can storage vMotion machines from Veeam Virtual labs, but note that Veeam will be unaware of that migration, so when you cancel running SureBackup job, Veeam will not detect where you have migrated that machine, nor we will delete it from new location.
- if you have production storage to use for tests, just run a full VM Restore \ Instant VM Restore(+migrate to production option in VBR UI) and connect said VM to a test network of choice? It gives same result as Sandbox but on production storage instead of running from backup.
- last but not least, if you have special supported SAN storage, Sandboxes could be ran from SAN Snapshots, giving you 100% of production storage performance for labs straight away!
Cheers!

[ASG]

Hi Egor,

Thanks for your input! The Virtual Lab Routing Engine is indeed quite nice to use regarding Isolated IP Access so we would stick to this rather than building a test network for these 2 huge tests and take care ourselves regarding network attachment of the VMs. Since sometimes 2 of our developers access there systems (and start the virtual lab) right now we can be shure that everything is isolated. Attaching networks ourselves might have a huge impact if someone makes an error.

The Storage used for the Lab is not our production storage (but the same IBM Type storage that is used for production Storage) - currently we don't use storage snapshots as they have to be licensed by IBM, but this might be a way to get more performance. But this uses the production storage rather than the LAB Storage we have here that is only used for our LAB (so our Labs don't impact Production Storage use) - so we need to think about it a bit more.

Thanks!
ASG

[ASG]

Just a Heads up:

It seems Storage vMotion is not possible to benefit from Storage Performance when using Virtual Lab. I can't storage vmotion the VM since vsphere says it can't find a vmdk file belonging to the vm. So it seems Storage Snapshot is the only way to get a better performance for the lab. Or restoring the VM and using a Network Translator as the lab appliance does.

[Egor Yakovlev]

Storage vMotion might be limited if you have enabled Write Cache Redirection in Virtual lab properties, for example.
As alternative , you can always use Veeam's Quick Migration and it should work just fine for that VM(machine will experience a short downtime period).
/Cheers!

[ASG]

Hi,

Indeed I have enabled Write Cache Redirection, but I will give it a try to see if it works with WCR disabled. But I hope I don't have to anymore - I've made a deep dive into the problem and found out one of our FC SFP+ for the LAB had some serious Problems - switched with a new one and the performance got way better. I'll let the developers decide if this level of performance is enough. Otherwise I'll give Storage vMotion without Write Cache Redirection or Quick Migration a try.

Thanks!