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On at least two occasions I was forced to recreate an instance on AWS. They send out an email similar to this: > We have important news about your account (AWS

On at least two occasions I was forced to recreate an instance on AWS. They send out an email similar to this: > We have important news about your account (AWS Account ID: 288053528466). EC2 has detected degradation of the underlying hardware hosting your Amazon EC2 instance (instance-ID: i-0480b1eb4617c84f3) in the us-east-1 region. Due to this degradation, your instance could already be unreachable. After 2016-08-16 01:00 UTC your instance, which has an EBS volume as the root device, will be stopped.

MaxBarraclough 6y ago
Could live-migration prevent that happening today? Depends on the nature of the degradation I imagine.
- roomey 6y ago
  That's where VMware on aws comes in ;) you get vmotion, so no downtime due to planned maintenance
  - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
    I was thinking of live migration performed by AWS. Are there situations where running your own VMware could help, beyond what AWS can do themselves? If there's a sudden outage, neither helps, as the instance disappears. If there's a minor issue, either should be possible.
    - jlgaddis 6y ago
      Well, if your instance is important enough, there's vSphere Fault Tolerance [0]: > You can use vSphere Fault Tolerance (FT) for most mission critical virtual machines. FT provides continuous availability for such a virtual machine by creating and maintaining another VM that is identical and continuously available to replace it in the event of a failover situation. > The protected virtual machine is called the Primary VM. The duplicate virtual machine, the Secondary VM, is created and runs on another host. The primary VM is continuously replicated to the secondary VM so that the secondary VM can take over at any point, thereby providing Fault Tolerant protection. > ... --- [0]: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/6.7/com.vmware.vsphere.avail.doc/GUID-623812E6-D253-4FBC-B3E1-6FBFDF82ED21.html https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/6.7/com.vmware.vsp...
acdha 6y ago
I’ve had that happen a couple of times but it’s definitely uncommon (single digit count for hundreds of instances over a decade). I haven’t seen it in a long enough time that I’m assuming they have a bulletproof live migration feature now.

MaxBarraclough 6y ago

Could live-migration prevent that happening today? Depends on the nature of the degradation I imagine.

roomey 6y ago
That's where VMware on aws comes in ;) you get vmotion, so no downtime due to planned maintenance
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  I was thinking of live migration performed by AWS. Are there situations where running your own VMware could help, beyond what AWS can do themselves? If there's a sudden outage, neither helps, as the instance disappears. If there's a minor issue, either should be possible.
  - jlgaddis 6y ago
    Well, if your instance is important enough, there's vSphere Fault Tolerance [0]: > You can use vSphere Fault Tolerance (FT) for most mission critical virtual machines. FT provides continuous availability for such a virtual machine by creating and maintaining another VM that is identical and continuously available to replace it in the event of a failover situation. > The protected virtual machine is called the Primary VM. The duplicate virtual machine, the Secondary VM, is created and runs on another host. The primary VM is continuously replicated to the secondary VM so that the secondary VM can take over at any point, thereby providing Fault Tolerant protection. > ... --- [0]: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/6.7/com.vmware.vsphere.avail.doc/GUID-623812E6-D253-4FBC-B3E1-6FBFDF82ED21.html https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/6.7/com.vmware.vsp...

acdha 6y ago

I’ve had that happen a couple of times but it’s definitely uncommon (single digit count for hundreds of instances over a decade). I haven’t seen it in a long enough time that I’m assuming they have a bulletproof live migration feature now.