Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 30th Nov 2009 23:45 UTC
Yesterday (today if you're in the US), Sun released the latest version of its virtualisation solution, VirtualBox 3.1. Among speed improvements and other smaller features, the biggest news is that Virtualox 3.1 introduces something called teleportation: you can move running VMs between machines - servers or clients, different architectures, different host operating systems, it doesn't matter to VirtualBox. Coincidentally, this reminded me of an idea I once had about moving running applications between machines.
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RE: Teleportation requires shared storage
by grat on Wed 2nd Dec 2009 00:05
in reply to "Teleportation requires shared storage"
Member since:2006-02-02
Oh, that would be so painful.
Typical migration time for a VM under VMWare ESX, using shared storage, is under 2 minutes.
Having to rsync even a mere 20gb virtual disk would be incredibly slow, and at some point you'd have to freeze disk I/O for some amount of time. I suppose, in theory, you could snapshot the disk, and mirror the snapshot, while you stream the journal to both the local machine and the remote machine, but just thinking about it gives me a headache. 
Member since:
2006-04-16
Seems that the new Teleportation feature requires the source and target machines to have access to shared storage (iSCSI, CIFS/NFS) where the contents of the Virtual Machine are stored.
I'm a little bit disappointed. While shared storage provides for the fastest migration of VMs I was expecting that Virtual Box could send the entire VM (if required) across the network (using rsync, for example).