On 1/23/07, David Boyes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
From the discussions that Perry Ruiter and I had back in 2000 about this, the biggest problems are primarily in device state and connectivity, followed by getting memory pages that have been flushed out to disk transferred, which implies some controlled effort to do the process migration. Uncontrolled migration attempts (eg, crash recovery situations) probably haven't a prayer of working.
I guess we're still at the "SCIDS design level" of this... I'd say that forcing the entire virtual machine to page out and let it page back in on the other side sounds logical and maybe not the most complicated part. But remember it would be to DASD unless we also architect shared XSTORE while we're at it. For the average Linux server, paging out 2 GB and page it back in would take a few minutes. Even when we can build large swap sets (and ignoring the fact that the receiving system may need to page out others for this). Pumping the pages through hipersockets could reduce the wait time with two orders of magnitude, but that's restrictive since it has to be on the same box. So most likely you would need something like PPRC over ISFC to build a copy of the working set at the receiving side. The actual delay would be just packing up the stuff that changed very recently, and restore that on the other side. Among the relatively easy parts would be integrity of accounting and monitor data during such a move ;-)
One area that might be interesting would be to investigate a Linux device driver using CP *BLOCKIO services for disk I/O instead of directly addressing the disks. There would be a performance impact, but the additional layer of isolation would effectively remove any disk
Most certainly. A high level interface offers gives much more flexibility for running the guest. A "Virtual SAN" that offers the guest "some blocks of disk" would make things much easier. VM would then decide if and where to put the data in the SAN. The current approach where intimate details about the disk device (like WWPN etc) are kept inside Linux configuration files makes things also very hard for what we talk about here. -- Rob van der Heij Velocity Software, Inc http://velocitysoftware.com/
