So can someone please explain to me why Microsoft is working on live migration and just did a demo(1, 2) of this new feature? Some of you might think, what the heck are you talking about? Well let me quote a couple of lines out of a MS Virtualization blog a couple of months ago:
We’ve drilled into these scenarios further and asked customers, who have currently have Live Migration capabilities, if they have changed their servicing process. In particular, when do they perform their hardware servicing. Is it during business hours 9-5? The overwhelming answer is, “No, we still schedule server downtime and notify folks of the scheduled downtime.”
Even customers with Live Migration still wait until off hours to service the hardware.
So if the customers are waiting until off hours, thus not needing this feature… why the hell spend all that precious time till 2010 to get this in 2008 R2!?! Why not spend your time useful and INNOVATE for a change? Come up with a feature that shocks the world.
Well let’s end this blog possitive, great idea to give away a stripped down standalone Hyper-V version away for free! Well it might sound as if I’m not serious, but I’m really curious how stripped down it is. What I understood is that it’s just Windows 2008 Core with Hyper-V pre-installed and all the other roles left out. Well we’ll just have to wait and see.
Lukas Beeler says
Ah well, that’s just marketing fluff.
The real reason is more likely that MS didn’t want to publish a half-working Live Migration and get a bad rep from the start, and instead released what was already working (and my experience with Hyper-V so far is very good). And what they’re writing right now is just the usual stupid marketing fluff – i still think it would do Microsoft very good if they would just fire everyone in a Marketing or PR position.
Live Migration is a very cool feature, but even if i would get my boss to pay for VMware VI, i doubt he would see any value in laying down an additional x thousand to get Live Migration capabilities. And my experience with our customers tends to go into the same direction.
Live Migration only gives you a benefit if you have short or no maintenance windows. Most smaller companies have a maintenance window that starts at 18:00 and goes until 07:00.
Now, don’t get me wrong – i want Live Migration, and i think it’s very cool. But i don’t see a Business reason for it in my field of smaller customers.
Duncan Epping says
You will not be paying an additional x thousand to get live migration on it’s own… I used to have a lot of SMB customers. And when they started out with VMware I had the same problems convincing them that VMotion, HA, DRS were useful also for small sites…
But when the first Server started to show hardware failures, for instance HP Insight Manager warning you that a certain threshold was almost reached they were all greatfull that they could vmotion the vm’s away and do the maintenance. Even if you can afford VMware there are more players out there that can offer you this basic functionality of which anyone can and should benefit!
And yeah I know it’s marketing crap… I know this very well,