vMotion and 10GBE

With the new lab setup and running on a 10 GB network, I was interested to see how fast vMotion was, I was not disappointed. I also wanted to see just how much bandwidth the vmkernal nic consumed so I used Putty and connected directly to the host and ran ESXTOP.  To view the network portion in ESXTOP,  you hit the “n” on your keyboard to switch to “network”. In the screen shot below vmk1 (which is my vmkernal for vMotion), I moved 3 VM’s from this host concurrently and you can see the MbTX/s is 8.8 GB.

vMotion will take as much bandwidth as it can get so be careful in your network design and make sure you have vMotion on it’s own VLAN and non routable. This was the first time I have ever used ESXTOP and there is also a VMware Fling called “Visual ESXTOP” that has tabs to select the different metrics instead of using your keyboard.