Chapter 15. KVM Migration
Chapter 15. KVM Migration This chapter covers the migration guest virtual machines from one host physical machine that runs the KVM hypervisor to another. Migrating guests is possible because virtual machines run in a virtualized environment instead of directly on the hardware. 15.1. Migration Definition and Benefits Migration works by sending the state of the guest virtual machine's memory and any virtualized devices to a destination host physical machine. It is recommended to use shared, networked storage to store the guest's images to be migrated. It is also recommended to use libvirt-managed storage pools for shared storage when migrating virtual machines. Migrations can be performed both with live (running) and non-live (shut-down) guests. In a live migration , the guest virtual machine continues to run on the source host machine, while the guest's memory pages are transferred to the destination host machine. During migration, KVM monitors the source for any changes in pages it has already transferred, and begins to transfer these changes when all of the initial pages have been transferred. KVM also estimates transfer speed during migration, so when the remaining amount of data to transfer reaches a certain configurable period of time (10ms by default), KVM suspends the original guest virtual machine, transfers the remaining data, and resumes the same guest virtual machine on the destination host physical machine. In contrast, a non-live migration (offline migration) suspends the guest virtual machine and then copies the guest's memory to the destination host machine. The guest is then resumed on the destination host machine and the memory the guest used on the source host machine is freed. The time it takes to complete such a migration only depends on network bandwidth and latency. If the network is experiencing heavy use or low bandwidth, the migration will take much longer. Note that if the original guest virtual machine modifies pages faster than KVM can transfer them to the destination host physical machine, offline migration must be used, as live migration would never complete. Migration is useful for: Load balancing Guest virtual machines can be moved to host physical machines with lower usage if their host machine becomes overloaded, or if another host machine is under-utilized. Hardware independence When you need to upgrade, add, or remove hardware devices on the host physical machine, you can safely relocate guest virtual machines to other host physical machines. This means that guest virtual machines do not experience any downtime for hardware improvements. Energy saving Virtual machines can be redistributed to other host physical machines, and the unloaded host systems can thus be powered off to save energy and cut costs in low usage periods. Geographic migration Virtual machines can be moved to another location for lower latency or when required by other reasons.