Virtual Machine Migration

What Does Virtual Machine Migration Mean?

Virtual machine migration is the task of moving a virtual machine from one physical hardware environment to another. It is part of managing hardware virtualization systems and is something that providers look at as they offer virtualization services.

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Virtual machine migration is also known as teleportation.

Techopedia Explains Virtual Machine Migration

In hardware virtualization, physical hardware pieces are carved up into a set of virtual machines — logical hardware pieces that do not have a physical shell or composition, which are essentially just programmed pieces of an overall hardware system. In a virtualization setup, a central hypervisor or another tool allocates resources like CPU and memory to virtual machines. For instance, in older networks, most of the individual elements were physical workstations, such as desktop PCs, which were connected by Ethernet cabling or other physical connections. By contrast, virtual machines do not have a physical interface. They do not have a box or shell or anything to move around. But they can be connected to the same keyboards, monitors and peripherals that humans have always used to interact with personal computers.

In virtual machine migration, system administrators move these virtual pieces between physical servers or other hardware pieces. In an effort to facilitate this, a new kind of migration has evolved called “live virtual machine migration.” Live migration involves moving these virtual machines without shutting down a client system. Modern services often provide live migration functionality to make it easier to move virtual machines without doing a lot of other administrative work.

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Margaret Rouse

Margaret Rouse is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical, business audience. Over the past twenty years her explanations have appeared on TechTarget websites and she's been cited as an authority in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine and Discovery Magazine.Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages. If you have a suggestion for a new definition or how to improve a technical explanation, please email Margaret or contact her…