Live Migration on Windows Server 2012

Artikel
07/23/2012

Rob Waggoner

Today I want to show you Live Migration. As the name implies, you can Live Migrate a VM from one host to another while the VM is still running. This capability was in Windows Server 2008 R2, but I wanted to show it to you in Windows Server 2012 as well. The video below will move the VM from the server H2 to the server H1.

Here’s a quick video that demonstrates Live Migration:

I agree that this pretty straight forward, but while I was recording the Shared Nothing Live Migration and Storage Migration I wanted to go ahead and record this one to be consistent.

I recorded and timed three migrations; Shared Nothing Live Migration, Storage Live Migration, and Live Migration (in a cluster). All three migrations leveraged the same servers and virtual machine to migrate the VM. While I agree my timings were not “scientific”, I think these timings will give you some insight into the performance as you plan your deployments.

Shared Nothing Live Migration took, 8 minutes and 40 seconds.

Remember, for this Live Migration the whole VM was copied over the network.

Storage Live Migration took 5 minutes and 12 seconds.

This was a faster move than transferring the whole VM “over the wire”. Yes, my iSCSI SAN is “on the wire” as well, but I have two iSCSI NICs dedicated to the SAN.