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Re: [Xen-devel] Live Migration of Linux Desktop



I succeeded to do live migration of Linux desktop just now. It is just
done with # xm migrate without any hack. It was easy but interesting
trial.
Are there somebody who have done same stuff? Or anybody has interest
about this issue?

Well, what I am thinking now is, what is the purpose of this. It is
interesting to do, and would have many feture usage, but has no actual
merit for now. I mean, it is even possible that I transfer my current
desktop to the cambridge Univ in live, but any merit there? I am afraid
that it would be just a geek toy currently. Tell me your ideas of usage.

For a desktop it doesn't seem so useful: if you're migrating your desktop system e.g. from home to work, whilst you travel by car you don't really need it to be a "live" migration. Stop and copy would work just as well - it'd be completed by the time you get there, and you won't notice the loss of interactivity whilst you're away from the console.

The live feature is most useful for datacentres: it gives you the ability to move server virtual machines to a less loaded host (load balancing across the server room) or use it to evacuate VMs from a host you're going to take down for maintenance. In this environment, the VMs may be serving your website, or part of your internal infrastructure, or you may be renting them out to customers, so you want them to remain live during the process - if you had to stop them in this circumstance, migration would be much less useful.

Really for "desktop" use, you'd also want some sort of disk technology to let you easily transfer just the modified bits of disk between systems, automatically. This would enable you to full migrate your "desktop" between home and work, whilst maintaining a cache of *most* disk state at both sites. It'd also be useful when transferring a virtual machine between your desktop and your laptop, for instance.

Cheers,
Mark

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