Determining a Migration Method to Use

Cold Migration

If the kernel zone is not already running, use cold migration when you need to move the zone to a different host.

Live Migration

If the kernel zone is running and providing services, live migration is typically a good method when moving the zone to a different host. A scheduled outage should not be required, the network connections remain, and the applications can keep running.

However, live migration is not suitable under any one of the following conditions:

• Slow network connection or poor bandwidth between hosts.

• Very large memory configured in the zone.

• Application needs a very low latency response time of less than a few hundred milliseconds. You should test the application to determine this.

• Device is enabled for multi-host disk control operations and the zone configuration includes the device property setting allow-mhd=true.

Warm Migration

If cold or live migration are not feasible, a warm migration might be a better choice under the following conditions:

• Zone has sufficiently sized suspend LUN available over shared storage.

  The size of the storage for the suspend image should be at least as large as the amount of memory allocated to the kernel zone in its capped-memory:physical property.

• Migration occurs during a maintenance window.

  An outage time of up to several minutes can occur.

• Reduced recovery time after migration is desired.

  Warm migration does not use significant network bandwidth. The zone's network connections might not stay up but applications do not require a cold restart.

If neither live or warm migration are feasible, shut down the zone completely and use cold migration.