Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Live Storage Migration in Windows Server "8" Hyper-V

Demonstrating one of the migration options in Hyper-V in Windows Server «8» Beta What a bunch of awesome new features that is available in this build.
This blog post will cover the Live Storage Migration.
Live storage migration allows you to migrate the storage of a VM (VHD and also the new VHDX) and the configuration files to be moved to new locations. And this will be performed live, while the VM is still running!

So basically, you can move it between SANs, SMB shares, DAS  and so on with no downtime.

The migration will copy every file (virtual hard disks, snapshots and configurations) and the VM will write and read to its destination during this process, and after the copy is completed, the VM will write to both locations (source and destination) while its copying the blocks that has been changed during the copy process. At last there is a clean-up process where the data is synced and the source is finally deleted.

1.       Right click on the VM in Hyper-V Manager (if your Hyper-V host is a node in a Hyper-V Cluster, you`ll get a message indicating that you have to use Failover Cluster Manager to perform this action. It`s a hard block by design, which is good!)

2.       Select Move the virtual machine`s storage and click next


3.       In this example, I`ll move every related file for this particular VM. But also notice you`re able to select files individually if you have special needs for not placing the files on same share/disk/LUN. This is a cheap lab environment and I have nothing to lose.


4.       Enter the location. In this example, I`ll move it to a network share, running on a Windows Server 2008 R2. Click next

5.       See the summary of the options you have specified and hit the finish button once you are ready


6.       The process has started



7.       And it`s done!

2 comments:

GALVACERO said...

how install windows server "8" in a VM in Hyper-v windows server 2008R2? the in installer say that needs drivers?

servers said...

I currently work for Dell and I found your blog on "Live Storage Migration in Windows Server "8" Hyper-V" quite informative and useful. It will be of great help to those who try to migrate live storage in window server.