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Live migration of virtual machines on Hyper-V
Movers
In Windows Server 2012, Microsoft has improved its high-availability feature across the board and added options for smaller businesses. You can now perform a live migration of Hyper-V hosts without using a cluster, and you can replicate virtual machines between Hyper-V hosts without needing to cluster them.
In the free Hyper-V Server 2012, Microsoft offers the hypervisor functions of the Windows Server 2012 Datacenter Edition completely free of charge. With this variant of Windows Server 2012, you can also install a cluster and take advantage of the capabilities described in this article.
Replicas
Hyper-V replicas let administrators replicate virtual servers between Hyper-V hosts – that is, copy them from a source host to a target server. This process can be done on the fly or can be scheduled. The virtual server on the source host always remains active, whereas the virtual server on the target server is switched off. Administrators can perform a failover of a virtual server manually or replicate a virtual server again at any time.
Thanks to live migration without clustering, admins can move a virtual server from the source to the target server on the fly and then enable the server. A new feature in Windows Server 2012 is the option to perform multiple live migrations simultaneously. In contrast to a replication, the virtual server is still only available on one server and can be moved on the fly.
Additionally, Windows Server 2012 lets you run Hyper-V in a cluster and define virtual server cluster resources. This makes moving virtual servers between nodes quick and easy. You can now also build a cluster of this kind with the Standard Edition (Figure 1). All of these features are also available free of charge on Hyper-V Server 2012.
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