Live Migration Advanced Guide

Overview

Live migration moves running VMs between nodes without downtime. Essential for cluster maintenance, load balancing, and disaster recovery.

Prerequisites

Network Requirements

# High-speed network for migration
# Minimum 10Gbps recommended
# Same subnet or routed

Storage Requirements

# Shared storage required:
# - NFS
# - iSCSI
# - Ceph
# - SMB

Basic Live Migration

Standard Migration

# Migrate VM to node2
qm migrate 100 pve2 --online
 
# Check status
qm status 100

Migration with Storage

# Migrate to different storage
qm migrate 100 pve2 --storage local-fast

Migration Options

Bandwidth Limit

# Limit to 100Mbps
qm migrate 100 pve2 --bandwidth 100M
 
# Unlimited
qm migrate 100 pve2 --bandwidth 10G

Compression

# Enable compression
qm migrate 100 pve2 --compression zstd
 
# Disable
qm migrate 100 pve2 --compression 0

Migration Type

# Force stop/start (offline)
qm migrate 100 pve2 --force
 
# Live (default)
qm migrate 100 pve2 --online
 
# Suspend (minimal downtime)
qm migrate 100 pve2 --suspend

Advanced Migration

SSL/TLS Migration

# Use encrypted migration
qm migrate 100 pve2 --migration_network 192.168.1.0/24
 
# Or use stunnel
pve-migrate -t stunnel

Migration via NAT

# Configure NAT in /etc/pve/datacenter.conf
migration: stunnel
 
# Enable NAT
pvesh put /cluster/options -migration_network 192.168.1.0/24

Post-Migration

Verify VM

# Check VM status
qm status 100
 
# Check resources
qm monitor 100

Cleanup

# Verify migration complete
qm list
 
# Remove old disk if needed
# (only for offline migration)

Troubleshooting

Migration Fails

# Check network
ping pve2
 
# Check storage
pvesm status
 
# Check logs
tail -f /var/log/pveproxy/access.log

Common Issues

ErrorSolution
TimeoutIncrease timeout
Storage not sharedUse shared storage
Network blockedOpen port 8006
MemoryReduce VM memory

Keywords

migration live-migration online-migration cluster ha failover


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