While things are quite at compiz front, I experimented a bit with Xen.

I was under the impression that to do a “live” migration gigaport switch, shared storage and über powerful servers would be required, I was pleasantly surprised with what I found out.

Two AMD Sempron 2700+ PC(no fancy VT/Pacifica) with 1 GB RAM connected with 10/100 ethernet are used for this experiment.

Step 1. Install SLES 10 SP 1 on both PC with Xen pattern. Disable Firewall in both during installation.

Step 2. Install SLES 10 SP1 in Xen on PC1(10.0.0.1)

Step 3. NFS Export /var/lib/xen from PC1 and mount it on PC2(10.0.0.2) (not sure if this is required)

Step4. Edit /etc/xen/xend-config.sxp to uncomment (xend-relocation-server yes) and (xend-relocation-hosts-allow ”) and reboot(not sure if reboot is required either)

Step5. Open Xen Manager in YaST on both PC, start sles-10-1 virtual machine on PC1. xm list to know the name on your setup.

Step6. Magic begins.. run

 xm migrate --live sles-10-1 10.0.0.2

on PC1 watch as it “shutoff” on PC2 and come up in PC2.

To make sure the migration is “live” you can keep the ping going on the IP of the virtual machine. Theoretically there should just be 60 - 100 ms drop in service, not really noticeable.

Note: Live migration means: moving a running virtual OS from one physical machine to another.

I’ve used SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) as it is best suited to do this kind of tasks easily, but this should be possible on anything that has kernel with Xen support.