Techniques for migrating a virtual machine using shared storage

摘要

Techniques for providing the ability to live migrate a virtual machine from one physical host to another physical host employ shared storage as the transfer medium for the state of the virtual machine. In addition, the ability for a virtualization module to use second-level paging functionality is employed, paging-out the virtual machine memory content from one physical host to the shared storage. The content of the memory file can be restored on another physical host by employing on-demand paging and optionally low-priority background paging from the shared storage to the other physical host.

主权项

1. A computer readable storage device tangibly embodying instructions operable to initiate a migration operation to transfer a virtual machine from a source computer system to a target computer system, the computer readable storage device comprising:
instructions that upon execution by the source computer system cause pages of guest physical memory allocated to a source virtual machine to be copied to a host operating system page file located in a shared storage medium while a guest operating system executes in the source virtual machine; instructions that upon execution by the source computer system cause pages of guest physical memory that the guest operating system changed while the pages of guest physical memory allocated to a source virtual machine are being copied to the host operating system page file to be identified; instructions that upon execution by the source computer system cause the identified pages to be copied to the host operating system page file; instructions that upon execution by the target computer system cause guest physical memory to be allocated to a target virtual machine; and instructions that upon execution by the target computer system cause the pages copied to the host operating system page file to be read into guest physical memory of the target virtual machine from the host operating system page file in response to receiving page faults associated with the pages copied to the host operating system page file.