philipmorgan.net

Recent developments in the server virtualization world allow even greater flexibility when you have several servers hosting virtual servers. You can use Live Migration to move a running operating system from one host server to another. With Microsoft’s Hyper-V product, you get this feature essentially for free. If you use VMWare’s product, this feature is an extra-cost add-on. Both products require some specialized hardware for this feature to work, but implementing Live Migration provides a tremendous amount of flexibility, allowing easier maintenance and load balancing for your virtualized servers.

 

For example, if you have two or more virtualization servers configured for Live Migration, you can move running virtual machines from one server to the other so that you can do maintenance on the first server. This reduces downtime for users and makes scheduling maintenance windows easier for IT staff.