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Is it possible to transfer a VirtualBox VM from one server to another without shutting it down? Is there any way to achive this? Does this technology have a name to identify it?

As far as I know Xen provides such a functionality, but when I played around with it, I had major issues in stability. For instance shutting down my Xen server using the reset-button, did not only simply restart, but had to be configured and checked first.

Same for KVM, providing a very good way to configure the "ideal" computer. I was impressed by it's vastness, but in terms of performance I encountered big issues. Does KVM provide this functionality?

I tried myself with VMWare as well. It is very similar to VirtualBox, but I couldn't find any possibility for the above question.

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    This technology is called live migration and it not available for desktop virtualization products like VirtualBox or VMWare Workstation/Player. No server should ever be shut down by the reset button - live migration obviously can't work when doing this.
    – Sven
    Dec 17, 2014 at 8:23
  • @Sven Thanks for your quick and accurate answer. You helped me a lot. And sorry for bein off topic. Which forum or QA should I approach fur enthusiast questions like this one?
    – Melauki Mawi
    Dec 17, 2014 at 8:27
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    If you need a High Availability solution, you’ll have to look into enterprise virtualization products. HA is expensive, though. But it can deal with crashing/failing machines.
    – Daniel B
    Dec 17, 2014 at 9:42
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    @SvW VirtualBox is supporting live migration since nov 2009.
    – jlliagre
    Dec 18, 2014 at 2:10
  • @jlliagre I already have posted that as an answer. Please check, they all support live migration. Dec 18, 2014 at 2:15

2 Answers 2

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The desktop virtualization technology VirtualBox does indeed provide live migration. It is called teleportation though. An example can be seen here.

XEN does provide this functionality.

And KVM provides this functionality as well.

And VMWare provides this functionality as well through vSphere.

Edit: Microsoft Hyper-V provides this functionality as well.

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You may be able to get the guest OS to "think" it didn't shut down, even though it actually will.

Don't most VM's have a way to save to disk a "snapshot" of the running guest system? Then you can close it normally, move the files to another computer, and start it up again loading the "snapshot" so it thinks it's been running the whole time...

Or, to keep doing whatever the guest OS is doing, you could start a second guest running somewhere else that can perform the same tasks, transfer the workload from the first guest to the second, then shutdown the second, hopefully without a long interruption of service.

But one way or the other, I think the original guest OS will be stopping

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  • Thank you for your quick response, though that was not the question. The question was ...transfer a VirtualBox VM from one server to another without shutting it down?.... Therefore, shutting it down and creating that snapshot would result in a time of the vm not being available. Therefore, not an option. Dec 17, 2014 at 8:54
  • You should clarify your question, it's unclear what "it" is that can't be shut down. And if you mean the VM guest OS being available 100% of the time, then I think the answer's "no"
    – Xen2050
    Dec 17, 2014 at 9:03
  • The question is clear to me. Sorry for offending you, that wasn't my intention. I already found out, that ´live migration` is possible with all of the above mentioned softwares, but I cannot post it, because I need at least a reputation of 10. Dec 17, 2014 at 9:05
  • No problem :) Updated with another option to maintain "service" (whatever it is)
    – Xen2050
    Dec 17, 2014 at 9:07
  • :) i'm quite interested on what the solution is for this issue. Dec 17, 2014 at 9:28

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