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RE: [Xen-users] P2V Migration of Windows

To: "'Bill Denney'" <denney@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, "'Henning Sprang'" <henning_sprang@xxxxxx>
Subject: RE: [Xen-users] P2V Migration of Windows
From: "Bernard Golden" <bgolden@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 13 Jan 2007 09:08:39 -0800
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Platespin and Leostream are primarily focused on migrating windows and
linux machines to Vmware, and, to a certain extend, MS Virtual Server.
They are better at migrating Windows machines than Linux. They do not,
AFAIK (my research was ~three months ago) focus on migrating to Xen.
There was a pretty good review of the two products in InfoWorld a few
months ago, here:

http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/06/30/79593_27TCmigrate_1.html

For Xen, you could look at XenOptimizer from XenSource. Also, I believe
the new commercial products from XenSource may very well have migration
capabilities in them. There are free versions of some of the products
and eval versions of others.

Regarding the usefulness of P2V versus migration, I think of migration
as a run-time capability offering load-balancing, failover, and DR
functionality, while P2V is an admin capability offering quicker (and
lower cost) virtualization setup. They have different purposes and are
both important for their respective capabilities.

HTH.

Bernard Golden 
Chief Executive Officer, Navica 
www.navicasoft.com 
Author, "Succeeding with Open Source," Addison-Wesley, 2005 
(T) 650 585 5309 (C) 650 400 3204 (F) 650 591 3805 
Sign up for Navica's monthly open source newsletter 
Read my open source blog for CIO Magazine 



-----Original Message-----
From: Bill Denney [mailto:denney@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx] 
Sent: Saturday, January 13, 2007 8:42 AM
To: Henning Sprang
Cc: xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [Xen-users] P2V Migration of Windows


Henning Sprang wrote:
> On 1/12/07, Bill Denney <denney@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> [...]
>> This is not the same.  Migrations are for moving without downtime.  
>> P2V is just what it says, moving physical to virtual.
>
> But, as I said, this migration without downtime premise is, in my 
> opinion, only possible with either virtualization that supports live 
> migration, or with a high availabilty setup for your services.
[snip]
> Maybe my idea of "no downtime" is wrong. For me it means:
> All services on the machine are fully accessible with no performance 
> loss and reachable under the same DNS name, IP address, and port 
> before and after the migration. Running transactions are not rolled 
> back, but continued on the new system. No outside system or human 
> realizes the switch and needs to change it's behaviour to use the 
> continued service.
I think that we are miscommunicating.  P2V does not generally have this 
"no downtime" guarantee; P2V is for the ability to rapidly move a 
working physical installation to a virtual installation.  It is not for 
services to continue uninterrupted.  Think of it more as similar to a 
scheduled reboot as opposed to a reinstallation.

I think that for everything else, we'll just need to agree to disagree 
on the usefulness of such a tool.

Bill


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