The following sections give step-by-step walk-throughs on some of the most
important features in Hyper-V R3.
Live-Migrating Virtual Machines
Hyper-V R3 marks a big improvement with live migration—that is, moving VMs
from one physical host to another without downtime. That improvement is
the ability to migrate VMs without shared storage or having both hosts
in a cluster, either of which is required for live migration in Windows
Server 2008 R2.
Simpler live migration is a must-have feature in virtualized
environments. Being able to quickly transfer over a VM from one physical
host to another is critical to quickly getting up and running in the
event of a disaster. If one host goes down, you can move a VM to another
host.
To run live migration, you must have two or more servers running
Hyper-V. The servers must have the same make of virtualization-supported
processor (either all AMD or all Intel—if the processors are different,
the VM will have to be shut down before migration); the servers must
belong to the same domain or to domains that have a trust relationship
with each other; and the VMs must be configured to use virtual storage
or virtual Fibre Channel disks.
To live-migrate VMs, you must be logged in as a domain
administrator or with an account that has proper permissions. You can
perform live migrations locally, through Remote Desktop, though a remote PowerShell session, or by
using remote management tools from a Windows 8 client.
In the following steps, Server 2012 VM is migrated from one
physical Server 2012 box to another. Both hosts are on the same subnet
on the same physical network, and the migration is performed
locally.
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To migrate a VM, right-click the VM from Hyper-V
Manager and click Move and then Next. Select “Move the
virtual machine” in the Choose Move Type window. Click Next.
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Next, you must specify the name of the destination computer.
You can browse to locate it in Active Directory (see Figure 1).
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Click Next, and the Move wizard displays the Choose Move Options window.
The choices are moving the entire VM and its associated data (such
as the virtual hard disk, snapshots, and its paging file), move only
the VM, or move the VM and its associated storage resources consumed
to different locations. In Figure 2, I’ve selected “Move the virtual
machine’s data to a single location” to move the data and the VM to
the destination.
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You then choose where to store the VM on the destination
folder. (See Figure 3.) Click Next
and then Finish.
You can also move virtual storage devices (VHD and VHDX files) for one or more VMs from one host to
another without shutting anything down. This capability gives you more
flexibility with virtual storage. System admins can use live storage
migration to upgrade storage, troubleshoot storage issues, or
reconfigure storage loads.
