Having been an early adopter of Hyper-V on Windows 2008, the improvements of Hyper-V in Windows 2008 R2 were definitely welcome with the Live Migration feature being the most useful in keeping virtual machines highly available.

Assuming you already know how to cluster your servers and understand CSV’s (Cluster Shared Volumes), configuring your server to be highly available is quite simple. You should carefully consider your host specs though because Live Migration doesn’t work with different CPU architectures. For instance, you can’t Live Migrate from a host using AMD processors to a host using Intel processors. Also, Live Migration is picky about the family of processors within the given architecture chosen, so make sure your processor specs are as similar as possible .There are ‘Processor Compatibility’ settings to allow you to migrate using different processor versions but if at all possible, try to purchase your hosts with the same specs to avoid not being able to use the Live Migration feature at all.

To use the Live Migration feature, you simply need to make your virtual machine highly available by choosing the ‘Configure a service or application’ under the ‘Services and Applications’ tab under your Cluster Management. The virtual machine has to be off in order to make it highly available. Once the virtual machine is configured and started, simply right-mouse click on the virtual machine and select “Live migrate virtual machine….” and select the cluster node. The amount of memory the virtual machine is configured to use determines the amount of time it takes to migrate it because in reality, that’s all that’s really being migrated.

Brian Pastre
Sr. System Administrator