Home HYPER-V Most misunderstood Virtual Machine Manager 2012 R2 Feature

Most misunderstood Virtual Machine Manager 2012 R2 Feature

by Cengiz Kuskaya

One of the most misunderstood feature in Virtual Machine Manager 2012 R2 is the cross migration of Virtual Machines from one Hyper-V Failover Cluster to another Hyper-V Failover Cluster or from one Standalone Hyper-V Host to a Hyper-V Failover Cluster.

Cross migration capability is provided by Hyper-V and the Failover Clustering feature of the Windows Server Operating System. Cross migration isn’t a feature of Virtual Machine Manager 2012 R2. It would not be wrong if we define Virtual Machine Manager as a User Interface to provide a centralized management overview for your virtualized environment.

VMM in reality uses native Hyper-V and Failover Clustering related Powershell Commands in the background if you do anything over the VMM Console UI.

The most wrong thought is that the addition of a Cluster or Standalone Hyper-V Host to a VMM 2012 R2 will automatically allow the cross migration of VM’s between Clusters or Standalone Hyper-V Hosts.

Prior to be able to cross migrate VM’s, Hyper-V and Failover Cluster must be configured. As soon as the cross migration of VM’s are possible over the Failover Cluster or over the Hyper-V Manager it will also possible over the VMM Console UI.

The addition of a Cluster or Standalone Hyper-V Host to VMM doesn’t automatically allow the cross migration of VM’s nor VMM is a required Software to cross migrate VM’s.

Some useful links regarding cross migration for your reference :

How to Move Highly Available (Clustered) VMs to Windows Server 2012 with the Cluster Migration Wizard
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/clustering/archive/2012/06/25/10323434.aspx

Migration of Highly Available Virtual Machines Using the Migrate a Cluster Wizard
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn486772.aspx

Migration Between Two Multi-Node Clusters
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn486774.aspx

Migrating Clustered Services and Applications to Windows Server 2012
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn486790.aspx

Hope it helps !