[CentOS-virt] Transfer of LVM based guests

Tue Nov 29 22:11:01 UTC 2011
Ed Heron <Ed at Heron-ent.com>

On Tue, 2011-11-29 at 15:51 -0500, James B. Byrne wrote:
> I am investigating the procedure to follow when moving a
> KVM guest instance from one host to another where the
> guest uses LVM as its storage.  As a preliminary cut I
> have cobbled the following together from various sources
> located through Google searches:
> ...

  If you are moving the virtual disk, you can't run the virtual machine while you are moving it.  Therefore, taking a snapshot (and removing it later) is superfluous.

  I use md5sum to give myself some extra re-assurance that a copy that big is accurate.

  Are the virtualization servers at the same location?

  How often do you move virtual machines?

  If your virtualization servers are in the same location, you might want to look into setting up a LAN for transferring virtual machine images.  It would only take an extra network card in each virtualization server and a Gb Ethernet switch (or better).

  If you are interested in virtual disk replication, you might want to look at DRBD.  It adds an extra layer to your storage, but allows for hot replication of disk space which would allow you to start a virtual machine on any virtualization server.