Storage Live Migration on Windows Server 2012

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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.

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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