Live migration
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Live migration allows a server administrator to move a running virtual machine or application between different physical machines without disconnecting the client or application. For a successful live migration, the memory, storage, and network connectivity of the virtual machine needs to be migrated to the destination.
VM memory migration
Warm-up phase
In memory migration of a VM, usually the Virtual Machine Manager copies all the memory pages from source to destination while the VM is still running on the source. If some memory pages change during memory copy process -- dirty pages, they will be re-copied until the rate of re-copied pages is not less than page dirtying rate [1].
Stop-and-copy phase
After warm-up phase, the VM will be stopped in source and the remaining dirty pages will be copied to the destination and VM will be resumed in destination [2].
VM managers with live migration support
- Virtuozzo
- Xen
- OpenVZ
- Workload Partitions
- Integrity Virtual Machines
- KVM
- Oracle VM
- POWER Hypervisor (PHYP)
- VMware ESX
- IBM VPAR with special migrator
- Hyper-V Server 2008 R2
- VirtualBox
Systems providing software live migration
See also
External links
- HOWTO Article about Xen migration
- OpenVZ checkpointing and live migration
- Live migration in KVM
- VMware VMotion
- Microsoft: Step by Step Guide for live migration
- Microsoft Whitepaper: Live Migration Overview & Architecture
- ^ Hacking, Stuart, et al., Improving the live migration process of large enterprise applications, VTDC'09.
- ^ Clark, Christopher, et al., Live migration of virtual machines, NSDI'05.