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Is it possible to transfer a VirtualBox VM from one server to another without shutting it down? Is there any way to achive this? Does this technology have a name to identify it?

As far as I know Xen provides such a functionality, but when I played around with it, I had major issues in stability. For instance shutting down my Xen server using the reset-button, did not only simply restart, but had to be configured and checked first.

Same for KVM, providing a very good way to configure the "ideal" computer. I was impressed by it's vastness, but in terms of performance I encountered big issues. Does KVM provide this functionality?

I tried myself with VMWare as well. It is very similar to VirtualBox, but I couldn't find any possibility for the above question.

Melauki Mawi
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2 Answers2

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The desktop virtualization technology VirtualBox does indeed provide live migration. It is called teleportation though. An example can be seen here.

XEN does provide this functionality.

And KVM provides this functionality as well.

And VMWare provides this functionality as well through vSphere.

Edit: Microsoft Hyper-V provides this functionality as well.

Melauki Mawi
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You may be able to get the guest OS to "think" it didn't shut down, even though it actually will.

Don't most VM's have a way to save to disk a "snapshot" of the running guest system? Then you can close it normally, move the files to another computer, and start it up again loading the "snapshot" so it thinks it's been running the whole time...

Or, to keep doing whatever the guest OS is doing, you could start a second guest running somewhere else that can perform the same tasks, transfer the workload from the first guest to the second, then shutdown the second, hopefully without a long interruption of service.

But one way or the other, I think the original guest OS will be stopping

Xen2050
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