What is Live Migration?

Definition of Live Migration

Live Migration is a technique used to transfer a virtual machine from one physical host server to another without any disruption of the service on the user’s end.

Explanation:

Live Migration is an efficient process of migrating a virtual machine in a live condition in order to ensure its availability even in worst case scenarios like while resolving some issue, updating some application etc. In order to perform Live Migration, firstly all the data from the memory of source virtual machine is copied to the memory of target virtual machine residing on some other physical host. This process could result in downtime of few seconds which can also be minimized or eliminated using few techniques like probability density function of memory, pre paging etc. After this transfer, all the required operating resources like CPU, storage etc. are created on the target site and all the applications are transferred to target machine to make it operational. In this way, the whole virtual machine migrates to another physical server without notifying or interrupting the end users of the system.