Re: Live Migration of Linux Desktop

[Harry Butterworth <harry@hebutterworth.freeserve.co.uk>]

If you were sitting in Red Square accessing your desktop remotely using
a wearable display and a mobile phone and your desktop service provider
needed to service the hardware that happened to be running it then it
would be convenient for them to be able to migrate it without
interrupting your current trading activity.

Or perhaps when you get home to the UK they might need to migrate it
from street-light to street-light so as to keep the network latency down
as you travel around.

Harry

On Mon, 2006-04-03 at 11:08 +0100, M.A. Williamson wrote:
> >I succeeded to do live migration of Linux desktop just now. It is just
> >done with # xm migrate without any hack. It was easy but interesting
> >trial.
> >Are there somebody who have done same stuff? Or anybody has interest
> >about this issue?
> >
> >Well, what I am thinking now is, what is the purpose of this. It is
> >interesting to do, and would have many feture usage, but has no actual
> >merit for now. I mean, it is even possible that I transfer my current
> >desktop to the cambridge Univ in live, but any merit there? I am afraid
> >that it would be just a geek toy currently. Tell me your ideas of usage.
> 
> For a desktop it doesn't seem so useful: if you're migrating your desktop 
> system e.g. from home to work, whilst you travel by car you don't really 
> need it to be a "live" migration. Stop and copy would work just as well - 
> it'd be completed by the time you get there, and you won't notice the loss 
> of interactivity whilst you're away from the console.
> 
> The live feature is most useful for datacentres: it gives you the ability 
> to move server virtual machines to a less loaded host (load balancing 
> across the server room) or use it to evacuate VMs from a host you're going 
> to take down for maintenance. In this environment, the VMs may be serving 
> your website, or part of your internal infrastructure, or you may be 
> renting them out to customers, so you want them to remain live during the 
> process - if you had to stop them in this circumstance, migration would be 
> much less useful.
> 
> Really for "desktop" use, you'd also want some sort of disk technology to 
> let you easily transfer just the modified bits of disk between systems, 
> automatically. This would enable you to full migrate your "desktop" between 
> home and work, whilst maintaining a cache of *most* disk state at both 
> sites. It'd also be useful when transferring a virtual machine between your 
> desktop and your laptop, for instance.
> 
> Cheers,
> Mark
> 
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