You can enable live migration of guest virtual machines using shared storage or commodity hardware by leveraging Flexible Storage Sharing (FSS) through Cluster Volume Manger (CVM) and Cluster File System (CFS), components of Storage Foundation Cluster File System HA (SFCFSHA). Using CVM significantly reduces planned downtime for individual virtual machines. Individual virtual machines can now be statefully migrated from host to host, enabling better load-balancing, lower machine downtime and path-management of individual physical servers. Physical servers (hosts) can now join and exit the server pool (physical server cluster) at will while the individual guest virtual machines and their corresponding applications continue to run.

For live migration, by using Fast Failover using CVM/CFS in the guest and host, rather than running a single-node Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM) in the host, you can run the CVM/CFS in the host and cluster multiple physical servers within the same server cluster or server pool. This configuration includes Cluster Server (VCS) also within the host. The significant advantage of creating a cluster of physical servers is that live migration of KVM or RHEV guest virtual machines from one physical server to another is fully operational and supported.

The live migration use case is supported for the following Linux virtualization techologies: