A Beginner's Guide to Cloud Live Migration

Posted by Sarah Wayne on January 27th, 2017

With all companies aiming to maximise their productivity, the last thing an organisation wants is to put everything on hold while their system updates. When it comes to making a profit, downtime is the enemy. That's why many organisations are utilising live migration to keep it at bay.

Livemigration is the process of moving an application from one physical location to another without being disrupted or disconnected. In other words, the application runs continuously throughout the moving process. It is usually needed when a server needs maintenance or updating. The goal is to keep the systems fully updated without any downtime.

When it first burst into the scene it was labelled as a turning point for virtualization technology. Now, it is used for practically every virtualization movement across all companies.

During cloud migration, there will be two locations. The source location (the computer currently running the program), and the target location (the computer you want to run the program on). The process takes place in a number of stages.Initially, all of the software information is transported to the target location and a configuration file is set up.After step one has finished up, the CPU, memory and storage are copied to the target location.Any changed memory pages are copied to the target location; this step is repeated until the quantity of the changed pages is greatly reduced. Next, running of the program on the first device is halted, and the final memory state is moved over to the target location.The program is then initialised in the target location and continues to run there.Throughout the five steps, the total downtime adds up to mere seconds.

As mentioned before, the ability to keep servers up to date without any downtime is the main purpose of cloud live migration. Downtimes costs the average company thousands of dollars per hour, so it's no wonder any tool that promises to eliminate it is such an attractive option.

As well as saving money, it is possible to perform multiple migrations on one host server at the same time. This means it's not just cash you're saving, but time. What's more, when disaster strikes, the ability to migrate programs from one host to another can dramatically ease recovery. Which, again, leads to less time spent out of action.

Overall, cloud live migration serves to drastically reduce the amount of downtime an organisation encounters. Which is absolutely vital for optimising the finances of any business. It is a great way to take some of the inconvenience and cost out of maintaining the most relevant versions of all applications.