Virtual Server - Quick Migration

I've been doing a lot of talks on Microsoft and Virtualisation recently.

The topic that seems to get a lot of interest is how we use Virtual Server and Clustering together to provide high availability.  Basically Virtual Server is a 'clusterable resource' - which means that any guest virtual machine can fail over between cluster nodes (for both planned and unplanned downtime) - offering the ability to quickly move a virtual machine from physical server to physical server (we currently support eight physical servers in a single cluster).

We've been able to do this since January 2006, but it seems that not a lot of people knew it (or weren't aware of what it meant).  To help with the understanding, we've renamed this feature from Host Clustering to Quick Migration.  For details on how to set this up, you can find the step-by-step instructions here.

Quick Migration simply saves the state of a running virtual machine (memory to disk), moves the storage connectivity from one physical server to another and then restores the virtual machine (disk to memory).  This is quick (seconds) - but it will depend on how much memory needs to be written to disk and the speed of the connectivity to the storage.  For your reference, a 512Mb virtual machine can be migrated from one server to another in about six seconds using 1Gb iSCSI.

I hope this helps.

Dave.

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Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  I read this article today, that mentions partner interest in the upcoming "hypervisor" virtualization