The performance characteristics of your PlateSpin Migrate product depend on a number of factors, including:
Hardware and software profiles of your source and target
Hardware and software profiles of your PlateSpin Server host
The specifics of your network bandwidth, configuration, and conditions
The number of your source workloads’ volumes and their sizes
File density (number of files per unit of capacity) on your source workloads’ volumes
Source I/O levels (how busy your workloads are)
The number of concurrent migrations and the number and type of the targets
Whether data encryption is enabled or disabled
Whether data compression is enabled or disabled
For planning large-scale workload migrations, you should perform a test migration of an average workload and use the result as a benchmark, fine-tuning your metrics regularly throughout the project. In addition to the data transfer process, also consider the other phases that a migration job goes through, as applicable to your project:
Preparation and network setup
Source workload and target machine discovery
Target configuration
If necessary, PlateSpin Migrate can compress the workload data before transferring it over the network. This enables you to reduce the overall amount of data transferred during a workload migration job.
Compression ratios depend on the type of files on a source workload’s volumes, and might vary from approximately 0.9 (100MB of data compressed to 90 MB) to approximately 0.5 (100MB compressed to 50MB).
NOTE:Data compression utilizes the source workload’s processor power.
Data Compression can be configured per migration job. You can also specify a default compression value to be applied globally (see Default Job Values).
PlateSpin Migrate enables you to control the amount of available bandwidth consumed by direct source-to-target communication over the course of a workload migration; you can specify a throughput rate for each migration job. This provides a way to prevent migration traffic from congesting your production network and reduces the overall load of your PlateSpin Server.
Bandwidth throttling is a parameter of a workload migration job’s configuration properties. See Specifying Network Options.
You can set up multiple workload migrations and run them simultaneously. Scalability testing performed with VMware ESX hosts suggests the following benchmark recommendations:
Multiple migrations to a single VM server: no more than 20
Multiple migrations against multiple VM servers (ESX): no more than 30