Virtual machine live migration

About live migration

Live migration is the process of moving a running virtual machine instance (VMI) to another node in the cluster without interrupting the virtual workload or access. If a VMI uses the LiveMigrate eviction strategy, it automatically migrates when the node that the VMI runs on is placed into maintenance mode. You can also manually start live migration by selecting a VMI to migrate.

You can use live migration if the following conditions are met:

  • Shared storage with ReadWriteMany (RWX) access mode.

  • Sufficient RAM and network bandwidth.

  • If the virtual machine uses a host model CPU, the nodes must support the virtual machine’s host model CPU.

By default, live migration traffic is encrypted using Transport Layer Security (TLS).

Additional resources