In a previous blog post Live Migration over NIC Team in Switch Independent Mode With Dynamic Load Balancing & TCP/IP in Windows Server 2012 R2 we looked at what Dynamic load balancing mode in NIC teaming can do for us . Especially in a switch independent configuration as until now there was no possibility to leverage the complete bandwidth provided by the NIC team when migrating between only 2 nodes. I that blog we used TCP/IP. Now we’ll configure Compression and see what that does for us.

So we set up a NIC team in switch independent mode with Dynamic load balancing, it’s identical as that one used for the tests with TCP/IP.

Compression basically slashes the live migration times in half at a cost. CPU cycles.And again with Dynamic load balancing we can now also use all member of a NIC team for live migration even in switch independent mode. The speeds for live migrating 6 VMs  with 9GB of memory simultaneously were 12-14 seconds.

Take a look at the screen shot above. You see 6 VMs coming in to the host where these counters are collected and after that you see them being live migrated away from the host. As we have plenty of idle cycles I this test lab they get used, both when being the target and the source of the VMs being live migrated. You can also see that a lot less bandwidth is needed to achieve a faster live migration experience (compared to TCP/IP).

By the looks of it the extra bandwidth will help out when we have less CPU and vice versa. This is both the case for a single NIC or teamed NICs. Do note that you cannot combine compression with Multichannel. That means that the only scenario allowing for multiple NICs to be used with compression is NIC teaming. When you have a bunch  of free 1Gbps NICs in surplus this might get things moving for you!

Interesting stuff. I’m really looking forward to the moment we can run production loads on these configurations …