I first saw F5 demonstrate long distance VMotion at VMworld 2009. A couple years ago, you were considered the cool kid on the block if you threw out the term ‘VMotion.’ Today it has become part of our everyday language and IT administrators consider it one of the best features of server virtualization. Now F5 and VMware are performing VMotions over long distance.

How and why could you use the solution?

Live data center migration. Virtualize first then live migrate the VM to a new data center. This is a new trend we see with migrating X86 workloads to a new data center as part of a larger IT consolidation initiative. For applications that require maximum uptime and are part of the migration long distance, live migration is valuable. Note: Web applications are a primary target for today’s solution.

Follow the sun/ moon. With the globalization of the workforce, long distance VMotion could help move applications closer to the user 24 hours a day. This scenario will come into play with desktop virtualization.

Disaster recovery. Typical DR solutions in a virtualized environment today will experience application outage. Campus type environments, such as a medical centers, could leverage long distance VMotion to enable any of a number of data centers on a campus to assume a primary role at any point.

Also think about how this could be leveraged with a third party capacity provider: IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service). Cloud service providers should start to look at this type of technology to help overcome the availability contention as IT organizations weigh their options to adopt cloud computing services.

Read more of Mark’s blog entries at Liquefying IT.