Live Migration on Windows Server 2012

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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.

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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