Does Hyper-V's Lack Of Live Migration Matter?

Posted by Bink on on September 10 2008, 9:00 PM with 1 comment(s)
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Microsoft on Monday said Hyper-V's oft-delayed Live Migration feature will be part of Windows Server 2008 R2 when it's released in 2010. While that might seem like a long time for Microsoft to add a feature that VMware has had since 2004, solution providers aren't concerned that Live Migration isn't part of the software giant's virtualization portfolio.

"Live Migration is not important to us at all at this point," said Rand Morimoto, president of Convergent Computing, an Oakland, Calif.-based solution provider and Microsoft Gold partner. "With what Microsoft offers out of the box today, I'm not sure whether we have a need for Live Migration."

Live migration, an enterprise-class feature included in the VMware and Xen-based virtualization platforms, makes it possible to move running virtual machines from one system to another system. Microsoft says a feature in Hyper-V called Quick Migration, which is almost as fast as live migration, can perform virtual machine migrations in just six seconds.

Jaymes Davis, virtualization practice manager at Entisys, a Concord, Calif.-based solution provider, says Quick Migration is sufficient for both planned and unplanned scenarios.

"I may experience an outage because I need to move a virtual machine, but because I have load balancing, I won't suffer any downtime as long as I have a cluster-aware application," Davis said.

"Live Migration is a great thing to have, and in Windows Server 2008 R2, it'll definitely be something the product needs," said Davis. "But right now, Quick Migration will suffice for companies' need to stabilize on a virtualization platform that saves them money and increases their business agility."

Morimoto notes that solution providers have other methods for ensuring high availability and disaster recovery for line of business applications, including leveraging the capabilities built into the apps themselves.

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Comments

daveberm wrote re: Does Hyper-V's Lack Of Live Migration Matter?
on 09-11-2008 1:27 AM

Quick Migration across data centers is one of the key features of the Hyper-V story that is being overlooked.  The quick migration of a Hyper-V VM across data centers is made possible by using Multi-Site Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC).  Where VMotion requires the VMs all reside on the same shared storage array, WSFC can leverage replication technology from their Multi-Site Cluster partners (www.microsoft.com/.../clustering-multisite.aspx)  to not only do a quick migration from one server to another, but also from one storage array to another, either in the same data center or across the WAN in an entirely different location.  

Quick migration of a VM across data centers is a feature that is lacking from VMware’s solution as neither VMware HA or VMotion support moving VMs across data centers to different storage arrays.  VMware’s solution for moving VMs across data centers is Site Recovery Manager.  Site Recovery Manager is positioned more as a disaster recovery solution than a quick migration solution and only supports certified array based replication solutions, not host based replication.

At the Microsoft Virtualization launch event held this past Monday in Bellevue, SteelEye announced DataKeeper’s support of Hyper-V virtual machine replication and Multi-Site Windows Server Failover Clustering support.  By combining host based replication of Hyper-V VMs with Multi-Site Windows Server Failover Clustering, a very cost effective business continuity solution for Hyper-V VM protection can be built that includes a RPO and RTO that will be hard to match with the tools currently available from VMware.

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