Cross pool migration with XO [feedly]

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Cross pool migration with XO
// Xen Orchestra

Hi everyone! A blog post about a new cool feature freshly implemented in Xen Orchestra: cross pool migration, AKA migration without shared storage (or Storage Xen Motion).

Concepts

In XenServer, you have to type of live migration: Xen Motion and Storage Xen Motion.

Xen Motion

Easy one. That's the name of migrating hosts with hosts sharing the same storage (NFS or iSCSI+LVM). It's already working in Xen Orchestra since... a long time!

In this case, the content of the RAM is sent over the network by Xen, from one host to another. Thus, RAM size and the network speed are correlated to the migration time.

Storage Xen Motion

The one I like the most. This time, a storage is not shared between hosts. In order to migrate a VM, you need to achieve multiples steps:

1. move the whole VM storage, network and configuration to another host
2. when it's done, migrate what's left: the RAM
3. finally, the "old" VM is removed on the original host

This process can be quite long: if your VM have a 100Gig disks, well... You need to transfer all of it!

But you stay safe: your VM is always online during the transfer!

In Xen Orchestra

We just implemented this feature in the next-release branch of xo-server. So, you can't see it in the interface now... but it's already available in xo-cli, see for yourself:

xo-cli vm.migrate_pool id=VM_UUID target_host_id=HOST_UUID target_sr_id=SR_UUID target_network_id=NET_UUID migration_network_id=NET_UUID

I have to say, xo-cli is a very useful tool to test quickly our new features in xo-server!

Unlike xe, you don't have to write the IP or the host password, because you are already connected. We just tested it, and it works :)

Next step? Implement it in the UI (xo-web) to provide a seamless experience. Stay in touch!

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