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Shared Nothing Live Migration on Windows Server 2012

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Rob Waggoner

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With Windows Server 2012 around the corner, I wanted to start sharing some of the capabilities that Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 will start providing.  Today I want to show you the Shared Nothing Live Migration.  Just as the name implies, you can Live Migrate a VM from one host to another over just a network cable.  Take note: Shared Storage and a Windows Cluster are no longer required to Live Migrate a VM from one host to another, but don’t tear down your cluster, or throw your SANs out yet!  They still provide plenty of value, but now you can Live Migrate a VM to another host, or even another cluster if you need to. 

 

Here’s a quick video that demonstrates Shared Nothing Live Migration:

As you can see, it really is pretty simple. 

Now let me give you a few of the details about my setup.  First, if you saw my Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V videos here, you may notice that I’m using the same server names that I was using for Windows Server 2008 videos.  The reality is that I’m using the same hardware I used for those videos.  That means the hardware is showing some age, but still runs Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V, just not as fast as some of the modern day hardware.  Second, the VM I was Live Migrating was about 16 GB in size and took 8 minutes, 40 seconds to Live Migrate from one host to another.  About 2 GB per minute?  As I said, I’m running on older hardware, I expect more current hardware to reduce this migration time significantly, but the reality is that Shared Nothing Live Migration still works.  I’ve even seen VMs Live Migrated from one laptop to another with just a single network cable. 

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.

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

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.

The same VM and hardware that took over 8 minutes to Live Migrate over the network took only 11 seconds to Migrate in a cluster.

I hope this information has helped, if you have any more questions, please let me know.

This session is one part of a whole series of screen casts around Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012, you can go this link to access the whole series.

So you want to get started with (Windows Server 2012) Hyper-V? Start here! – In Summary

Until next time!

Rob

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Comments

  • Anonymous
    September 17, 2012
    Does the shared nothing live migration works with 2 machines having different hardware or they should be the same hardware?

  • Anonymous
    November 10, 2012
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    February 28, 2013
    Do you know a private netwrok can be created just for live migration? For example dedicate one NIC on each server on private vLan and move the VMs back and forth.

  • Anonymous
    December 23, 2013
    Pingback from Does "Shared Nothing" Migration Mean the Death of the SAN? | VirtualQube Blog

  • Anonymous
    September 26, 2014
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    September 30, 2016
    Thank you Rob for this article, it helped me to understand this scenario. Will test it soon though ;)