SMB Bandwidth Limits and Shared Nothing Live Migration

This week I have been discussing the network QoS options available for a Windows Server private cloud.  On Wednesday I talked about the SMB bandwidth limit capability - that allows you to specify separate bandwidth limits for virtual machine storage and live migration traffic over SMB.  One interesting thing to understand is how this effects shared nothing Live Migration.

A shared nothing live migration performs a synchronized storage migration and memory migration for the virtual machine.

In this scenario, the storage migration traffic of a shared nothing Live Migration (and indeed any storage migration traffic) is tracked by the virtual machine storage SMB bandwidth limit - not the Live Migration SMB bandwidth limit.  The Live Migration SMB bandwidth limit only applies to the memory transfer of any virtual machine Live Migration.

Cheers,
Ben