Hyper-V Quick Migration vs. VMware Live Migration

For all of the benefits, there are a few things about virtualization that IT pros need to be aware of when they plan on implementing virtualization. One of these is the way virtualization can create a single point of failure.

Let's say you have 10 servers running 10 workloads. When one fails, you have a problem, but a fairly small and manageable problem. Now adopt virtualization and put those 10 workloads on two servers. See what I did there? Lose one and you have a much bigger problem.

VMware's VMotion is a popular tool to help migrate virtual servers when there's a failure. Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 has as a similar option. Jeff Woolsey from Microsoft's virtualization product team takes a closer look at this feature and compares it to Live Migration with VMotion in a three-part blog series: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

Hyper-V integrates with Windows Server 2008 Failover Clustering so that if you pull out the power plug, all of the virtual machines will automatically restart to another node without user intervention. Furthermore, this capability is simply included (at no extra $$$) with Windows Server 2008 Enterprise and Datacenter Editions.

As for VMotion:

In the case of unplanned downtime, VMotion can’t live migrate because there is no warning. Instead you must have VMware HA configured and the best it can do is restart the affected virtual machines on other nodes which is the same as what is provided with Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and Failover Clustering.

Thanks to Malcolm Bullock for the links.