Continuing in our discussion of Server 2008 R2, one of the interesting new features is something Microsoft calls “Live Migration.” This allows you to migrate one or more virtual machines from one physical machine to another physical machine (say, a newer, bigger, and faster one) with no downtime.
Ahhh…”no downtime.” Music to my ears. Of course, there are a number of requirements for this to work. You have to be using failover clustering, first of all, and your source and target machines need to be within the same cluster. Second, your old and new VMs need to be able to see the same shared storage device (that is, the same CSV, or Cluster Shared Volume). And third, the VHD files have to be on the same CSV.
The cool thing here is that Server 2008 is smart enough to know when the new VM has been built on the target cluster node and when all memory pages have been copied over to that node, at which time all client traffic is routed to the new VM and Windows deletes the source VM. I haven’t yet tried this Live Migration capability, but as soon as I get a chance, I’ll post the results. Meanwhile, if any of you Faithful Readers have begun experimenting with this, please let us know of your experiences.
Recent posts:
