Live migration outside a clustered environment Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V live migration lets you perform live migration outside a failover cluster. The two scenarios for this are: SMB-based live migration. In this instance, each virtual machine’s hard disk is stored on a central SMB file share. You then perform a live migration of the virtual machines from one server to another while their storage remains on the central SMB share. “Shared-nothing” live migration. In this case, the live migration of a virtual machine from one nonclustered Hyper-V host to another begins when the virtual machine’s hard drive storage is mirrored to the destination server over the network. Then you perform the live migration of the virtual machine to the destination server while it continues to run and provide network services. The following subsections walk you through the process of setting up these two types of live migration. Scenario 1: Setting up a SMB-share-based live migration in Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Live migration setup: During the live migration setup stage, the source host creates a TCP connection with the destination host. This connection transfers the virtual machine configuration data to the destination host. A skeleton virtual machine is set up on the destination host, and memory is allocated to the destination virtual machine, as shown in the following figure.
Figure 8: Live migration setup
Windows Server 2012: Server Virtualization
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