Hi Pandora,
Lets just make a note for the record this is for a research project and that the recommendations here may not be applicable to business production networks. That said the very early vMotion tests showed promising results.
Yes, I see L2 and L3 is now supported and upto 150ms latency.
The vSphere server benchmarks seemed sufficient for testing? Perhaps the datastore just needs to move to the SSD drives? The Atom and Celeron based appliances will probably have less throughput than the current servers. Perhaps reserving more CPU Mhz may improve things if this is the goal.
If dedicated hardware is required, the replacement for the end of sale 200 is the 250. Using compression only the 250 should be able to do 100 Mbps over 50 Mbps at 2x compression ratio. For vMotion the 250 can provide 30 Mbps with deduplication enabled.
But what I really think is required is to define the long distance vMotion link speed. I did not read the cloudnet paper word for word but I see they mention that they got good results at 50 Mbps. What is your target vMotion WAN link speed?
I think the target WAN link rate, in this unique case, is the most important metric and then the hardware can be spec'd around the target rate.