Tip of the Day: Faster Live Migration for Hyper-V

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Today’s Tip…

Windows Server 2012 R2 brings us faster and more options for Live Migration of virtual machines.

Option

Description

TCP/IP

This same method as used in Windows Server 2012.
Compression

The memory content of the virtual machine that is being migrated is compressed and then copied to the destination server over a TCP/IP connection. This is the default setting in Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 R2.
SMB

The memory content of the virtual machine is copied to the destination server over a SMB 3.0 connection.

  • SMB Direct can be used when the network adapters on the source and destination servers have Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) capabilities enabled.
  • SMB Multichannel automatically detects and uses multiple connections when a proper SMB Multichannel configuration is identified.

The older style Live migration is still in the product, listed above as ‘TCP/IP’. But now we also have ‘Compression’ and ‘SMB’. When the Compression option is utilized, the contents of the virtual machine’s memory is compressed before it is copied to the destination location. When the ‘SMB’ option is utilized, Live Migration takes advantage of SMB 3.0 functionality (RDMA capable NICs are needed on both source and destination).

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