Live Migration is the process of moving a running virtual machine (VM) from one physical server to another while not disrupting the availability of the virtual machine to users.
The goal of a VM live migration is to enable maintenance or upgrades to be performed on a VM without any of the virtual machine’s users experiencing down-time during the migration. Live migrations are also known as seamless live migrations when there’s no discernible downtime to the end user during the migration process.
Support for Live Migrations in Modern Hypervisors
The live migration of a virtual machine process involves completely transferring all memory, storage and network connectivity settings for a virtual machine from the original guest machine to the destination machine.
Live Migrations are a feature of most modern hypervisors, including Microsoft’s Hyper-V (as of Windows Server 2008 R2, which replaced the Quick Migration feature with Live Migration), VMware s vSphere (via vSphere vMotion), KVM and Xen.
