Live Migration With AMD-V Extended Migration Technology

Overview

Virtual Machine migration is a capability being increasingly utilized in today's enterprise environments. With live migration, a Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) moves a running Virtual Machine (VM) nearly instantaneously from one server to another for a seamless experience to the end user while maintaining guest uptime. However, if the processors running in the computers in the pre and post migration environment are not identical, live migration can result in unexpected behavior of the guest software. Since the introduction of its AMD64 processor technology in 2003, AMD has worked closely with virtualization software developers to define the functionality necessary to ensure that live migration is possible across a broad range of AMD64 processors.