Seamless Live Virtual Machine Migration by Mitigating Shared Storage Resource Constraint

Virtual Machine(VM) Migration is a widely acknowledged feature of most top-selling virtualization solutions; helping businesses tackle the hardware maintenance and server consolidation challenges without the need to affect solution availability. To reap the advantages of this flexibility, businesses have to plan their server networking and storage infrastructure, which includes cabling layout, well in advance. Providing connectivity and sharing of same storage resources across servers is a daunting task and often proves to be a bottleneck for the ability to migrate a VM, to a not planned destination server. The objective of this paper is to provide efficient workable solution for migrating VMs across different servers; in different kinds of data center layout, where storage may not be shared and/or have heterogeneous( i.e. FC / iSCSI / SAS / FCoE) connectivity. We are showcasing enhanced VM migration solution.

We were able to successfully extend existing VM Migration solution to achieve VM migration across servers with multiple kinds of storage connectivity and/or servers without common shared storage.

This implementation provides flexibility to businesses in migrating a VM anywhere in their data center irrespective of storage connectivity type and/or shared storage. This will provide big savings for businesses and enhances their flexibility for better management of data center and cloud based services.

Learning Objectives

Live Machine Migration without shared storage