SCVMM 2012 Maintenance Mode and Hyper-V Live Migration

I suppose I should start this post with the following disclaimer: this is not an official performance test or benchmark, I'm just sharing a few observations and tips from some testing I've done. 

Anyway, in case you're wondering how long it takes to fully evacuate a Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V node using SCVMM 2012 and a 'Start Maintenance Mode' operation, the answer of course is "IT DEPENDS".  For the systems i'm working with at this time i'm getting a run time of about 46 minutes to evacuate 20 highly available VMs from a Hyper-V node. VM migrations are processed one at a time and each VM is currently taking around 2 minutes to evacuate. One caveat with this number is that a heavily loaded VM running a high performance workload can take much longer to migrate.  The underlying technology which makes this "evacuation" possible is Hyper-V Live Migration. More information about Live Migration is available with this Guide and this FAQ.

The configuration is running on a set of new issue Dell blades with lots of CPU and RAM, high speed networking & storage.  For any serious data center management tasks this setup is fairly standard these days. 

If you need some advice and guidance on selecting hardware, see Microsoft's Hyper-V Fast Track program: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/private-cloud/hyperv-cloud-fast-track.aspx.  The Fast Track program is being updated with new information for System Center 2012, and soon Windows Server 8 comes into sharper focus, so this program will be a good thing to keep an eye on.

With Maintenance Mode provided by VMM we can do various maintenance tasks on the cluster nodes, such as software updates, without incurring any downtime of the running virtual machines.  The Dynamic Datacenter is very exciting and it's happening now!

Glenn Walton

Infrastructure Architect, Microsoft Enterprise Services