Online migration:

• Vacating a VM Host system: With Online VM Migration, you can migrate all your guests from a VM Host to one or more other VM Hosts without interrupting the workload activity on the guests. A common reason to do this operation is for the maintenance of the VM Host system, such as hardware, firmware, or software.

• Targeting a particular VM Host: You might also want to migrate an active guest workload to a particular VM Host to take advantage of a particular resource or feature on that target VM Host without losing application availability.

• Balancing VM Host workloads: You might want to segregate guests to balance the workload on VM Hosts. Perhaps, you may also want to group workloads together that have similar special resource requirements.

• Optimizing physical resource utilization: You can conveniently "park" idle, near-idle, or just currently less-critical guest workloads together on a smaller or less powerful machine.

Offline migration:

• The guest might have stopped, so you need to move the configuration information offline.

• Migrating the virtual machine offline does not use the VMHost resources (like memory and CPUs) on the source and target VM Hosts.

• The source and target VM Hosts might have different processor types that prevent online migration.

• The source VMHost might be running a version of Integrity VM prior to Version 4.2, which does not support Online VM Migration.

• You can offline migrate guests between different processor families.