Vertica Supports Vmotion ?

Arvind_Sugurr

Hello,

Could anybody confirm if the latest version of vertica supports VMotion of the productions?

Regards,
Arvind Sugurr

Arvind_Sugurr

Any update ?

Jim_Knicely

Hi,

The "Configuring and Monitoring Virtual Machines for Vertica 7.2.x" blog post still applies to Vertica 9.2.x.

See:
https://www.vertica.com/kb/Configuring-and-Monitoring-Virtual-Machines-for-Vertica-7-2-x/Content/BestPractices/Configuring-and-Monitoring-Virtual-Machines-for-Vertica-7-2-x.htm

Specifically:

Vertica does not support the following feature: VMware Vmotion

dgrumann

It would be useful for the official Vertica documentation to clarify this topic, as customers are more often using ESX as a platform for Vertica these days. Perhaps what Vertica doesn't wish to support is storage vmotion and with some validation might be willing to support server vmotion however that would be up to the product owners.

dgrumann

This question comes up often from our ITOM customers - the article https://www.vertica.com/docs/9.2.x/HTML/Content/Authoring/SupportedPlatforms/Virtualization.htm should be edited to be more clear about how customers should disable vmotion. Also, the blog/KB article is great but does not mention "In order for Vertica to function effectively in a virtualized environment, use the --point-to-point flag" for install_vertica.

Bryan_H

Hi dgrumann, while Vertica does not support vmotion, in reality cloud environments do move the compute environment all the time in a similar manner. GCP and Azure are particularly bad about this. The good news is, point-to-point helps a bit by raising the default spread timeout, and v9.2.1 allows you to configure spread timeout to a level where a node won't be lost while GCP/Azure/vmotion moves it. The bad news is, if you do lose a node and send us a scrutinize showing node eviction due to network timeout, we're going to tell you to turn off vmotion as it is not supported.
Current docs detail spread timeout settings in VM and cloud environments using Azure as the example: https://www.vertica.com/docs/9.2.x/HTML/Content/Authoring/UsingVerticaOnAzure/AdjustingSpreadDaemonTimeouts.htm

dgrumann

Bryan thanks for the information - good pointer but yes now we have different little tidbits of info spread across different docs and blogs it sure would be good to pull them all together somewhere so we can give customers one URL to go to for all VMware ESX vertica deployment best practices.

dgrumann

This topic is still being raised because customers are unable to completely disable vMotion, and also various cloud environments have underlying vmotion-like behavior.