Some Hyper-V Live Migration Thoughts and Resources

The new Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 allows for Live Migrations out of the box since it is based on the Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise operating system.

In the case of our Intel Modular Server based Hyper-V cluster, the Live Migration feature allows us to run routine maintenance tasks on each node in the cluster without disturbing the production network environment the VMs are servicing.

For instance, if the SBS 2008 VM is currently running on Node 1, we can live migrate the VM over to Node 2 and then run updates against the Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 OS on Node 1 with the requisite reboot.

Once the updates have completed and our last reboot was behind us we could live migrate that SBS 2008 VM and any other VMs running on Node 2 over to Node 1 and run the update routine on Node 2 and eventually on any other nodes in the cluster.

Now, it is important to note that the Live Migration feature is only available to nodes within a Failover Cluster that are connected to shared storage. We cannot take a VM running on the 1U SR1630HGP management server Hyper-V Role and live migrate it over to the cluster.

This is a pretty neat feature for a _free_ product like Hyper-V Server 2008 R2!

• Microsoft Downloads: Download details- Hyper-V Live Migration Overview & Architecture
• TechNet: Demo - Hyper-V Server and Live Migration Media TechNet Edge
• Windows Virtualization Team Blog - HYPER-V QUICK MIGRATION & VMWARE
• Virtualization Team: Videos on the new version of Hyper V and Hyper V Server
• TechNet: Hyper-V- Using Live Migration with Cluster Shared Volumes in Windows
• Hyper-V Live Migration vs. Quick Migration Virtualization Team
• Bing Search: Hyper-V Live Migration

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer