Storage Live Migration on Windows Server 2012
Rob Waggoner |
With Windows Server 2012 around the corner, I wanted to start sharing some of the new capabilities in Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V. Today I want to show you Storage Live Migration. Just as the name implies, you can Live Migrate a VM from one disk to another while the VM is still running. The video below will move my VM from local storage to iSCSI storage on my Equallogic SAN. Take note: I could have moved my VM to any other disk attached to my Hyper-V host, I just chose the iSCSI drive since it’s the only other drive that server has access to. This will be a handy way to move your workloads real-time if disk capacity starts to become an issue.
Here’s a quick video that demonstrates Storage Live Migration:
As you can see, this is pretty straight forward, but now I have the video you can leverage if anyone wants to give it a look.
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.
- Live Migration took 11 seconds!
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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