Live Migration of Hyper-V VM’s with 3PAR across datacenters

In November 2009 I met Matthias Popp from HP Labs at Microsoft TechEd 2009 in Berlin. During that event he showed me the first example of a live migration of Hyper-V Virtual Machines between two datacenters. The setup demonstrated a multi-site cluster, two HP EVA storage arrays with Continuous Access and HP Cluster Extensions (CLX) which takes care of the storage failover if one of the datacenter fails or when the storage has to be taken down for maintenance at one location.

This week at HP Discover 2011 in Las Vegas, I talked to Matthias again. HP announced that similar functionality is now available for HP 3PAR storage and was really the first integration created for the newly acquired Cloud Storage platform.

In this video Matthias shows how a stock trading system runs in several VMs in one datacenter and how they are live migrated to the other datacenter without losing its availability or its performance. The VM’s run on top op Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V hosts and are migrated via the built-in Cluster Administrator.