Introduction to Virtual Machine Migration

Virtual machines can be moved from one VM Host system to another in a variety of ways. Integrity VM provides the following types of virtual machine migration:

To move the virtual machine from one VM Host system to another, use the hpvmmigrate command. Optionally, you can modify the virtual machine characteristics and resources at the same time. For example, use this method if the new VM Host has different resources from the old VM Host. For more information, see Section .
To move the virtual machine from one system to another, use the p2vassist utility. For example, use this method to move virtual machines from a partition or a system to a VM Host system. Guests must be shut down before the procedure and restarted after the migration. For more information, see Section .

Figure 10-1 illustrates the process of moving a guest from Host A to Host B.

Figure 10-1 Symmetric Hosts Configured for Guest Migration

The basic virtual machine migration configuration includes a source machine and a target machine. Both must be running Integrity VM and must be able to run the guests. Both machines must conform to their operating system requirements and restrictions, and both must be able to provide the allocated resources to the guest. If the guest uses 2 GB of memory on one machine, it must be able to use that amount on the other machine. Similarly, if the source machine can provide a guest with four vCPUS, the target machine must also be able to provide them. To modify the virtual devices or network on the target host, use the hpvmmodify command.

To enable migration the source and destination hosts must be configured symmetrically. That is, all the network and storage resources must be configured the same on both hosts. A symmetric configuration includes:

A common local area network (LAN)
Identical network interfaces configurations
Storage Area Network (SAN) based boot disks
Identical Fibre Channel port configurations

For guidelines about setting up storage for migrating virtual machines, see Section .

If the HP Capacity Advisor is used on the virtual machine, collect utilization information before you migrate the virtual machine. The Capacity Advisor cannot continue to collect the utilization information for the virtual machine during the migration operation.

Introduction to Virtual Machine Migration

Technical documentation

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