WINDOWS LIVE MIGRATION WITH TRANSPARENT FAIL OVER LINUX KVM

摘要

Methods, software, and apparatus for implementing live migration of virtual machines hosted by a Linux operating system (OS) and running a Microsoft Windows OS. Communication between the VM and a network device is implementing using a virtual function (VF) datapath coupled to a Single-root input/output virtualization (SR-IOV) VF on the network device and an emulated interface coupled to a physical function on the network device, wherein the emulated interface employs software components in a Hypervisor, and the VF datapath bypasses the Hypervisor. In one aspect, the VF datapath is active when the SR-IOV VF is available, and the datapath fails over to the emulated data path when the SR-IOV VF is not available. Disclosed live migration solutions employ Windows NDIS (Network Driver Interface Specification) components including NDIS Miniport interfaces and MUX IM drivers, enabling live migration to be transparent to the Windows OS. NetKVM drivers are also used for Linux Hypervisors including KVM.