CrossPoolMigrationv3
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This page describes a possible design for Cross-pool migration (which also works for within-pool migration with and without shared storage).
This design has the following features:
- disks are replicated between the two sites/SRs using a "replication service" which is aware of the underlying disk structure (e.g. in the case of .vhd it can use the sparseness information to speed up the copying)
- the mirror is made synchronous by using the *tapdisk* "mirror" plugin (the same as used by the existing disk caching feature)
- the pool-level VM metadata is export/imported by xapi
- the domain-level VM metadata is export/imported by xenopsd
See the following diagram:
This design has the following advantages:
- by separating the act of mirroring the disks (like a storage array would do) from the act of copying a running memory image, we don't need to hack libxenguest. There is a clean division of responsibility between managing storage and managing running VMs.
- by creating a synchronous mirror, we don't increase the migration blackout time
- we can re-use the disk replication service to do efficient cross-site backup/restore (ie to make periodic VM snapshot and archive use an incremental archive)