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→The Capabilities and Restrictions of Virtual Machine Migration
Firstly, a virtual machine can only be exported if it is shut down or saved. A running or paused virtual machine cannot be migrated. Some readers may be familiar with the live migration capabilities of virtual solutions such as Xen and VMware VMotion which allow a running virtual machine to be moved from one server to another without any perceptible interruption of service. Whilst Microsoft are working on such a feature for Hyper-V, the current version supports only the static migration of a powered off virtual machine.
Secondly, the set of files comprising an exported virtual machine may only be imported by once into a Hyper-V server. The reason for this is that the imported virtual machine will be stored and run from the location from which it was imported. the advantage of this is that, whilst the export process can take a considerable amount of time to complete, the import is generally completed in a matter of seconds. If , however, an exported virtual machine is to be imported into multiple Hyper-V servers, separate copies of the export folder will need to be used for each import.
Thirdly, the Hyper-V Import feature is only able to import Hyper-V based virtual machines. The configuration format used by Virtual Server 2005 and Virtual PC is incompatible with that used by Hyper-V.
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Now that we have covered what Hyper-V cannot do, it is time to look at what it can do. Hyper-V can migrate any Hyper-V virtual machine from any Hyper-V server to any other Hyper-V server. The migrated virtual machine will include all the configuration information pertaining to the virtual machine, together with any virtual hard drives assigned to it. In addition, the export feature allows only the virtual machine's configuration to be exported, thereby excluding any virtual disk drives from the export package. This feature can be useful for situations where only the virtual machine's configuration needs to be duplicated on a different Hyper-V server.
