Hyper-V Live Migration delayed? No worries. Quick Migration is good enough, some say

Monday’s news that Live Migration will be delayed another two years until

Windows Server 2008 R2 is released in 2010 isn’t worrying Microsoft resellers, reports ChannelWeb. (Note, VMware supported hot migrations in 2004.) Live Migration was considered the achilles heel of Hyper-V, especially to the Microsoft channel, but now resellers are saying that Quick Migration is good enough. Quick Migration isn’t hot swappable, but only needs about six seconds of downtime to move virtual machines around. If Hyper-V is mirrored for load balancing and failover, particularly on clustered machines, users wouldn’t experience any outage at all, some note.

If users have Microsoft apps on Hyper-V, all the better because many of those apps (Exchange, SQL Server) also have built-in failover mechanisms. So you can ward against downtime when moving VMs around at the application level. Again, this is early VMware technology that Microsoft is replicating years later, but given the price point of Hyper-V, is it good enough? Most likely.

Nevertheless, would be better for Microsoft and its customers if being good enough wasn’t good enough for the software giant. Rather than giving customers most of what they expect and then battling an established competitor on price, Microsoft could put its massive human talent into trying to improve on competing products both in feature set and quality.

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