VMTN Blog

We say this all the time, but don't listen to us, listen to other people using VMware. We will eventually look back on planned downtime (or emergency downtime for patching) like something quaint and obsolete. (What's a good example of something an admin would have to do 30 years ago that we laugh at now? Wait for your overnight batch job to come back? Load the line printer with green bar fan-fold paper? Swap giant disk platters? I'm sure you can come up with better ones. Anyway, we'll think of it like that.)

Link: It’s Just Another Layer » So how important is LiveMigration/VMotion now?.

One of Microsoft’s big marketing statements I’ve heard several times is that LiveMigration wasn’t that important since clients don’t change when they do work on hardware even with LiveMigration.   I’ll cover why this in depth on why this is a flawed thought for an enterprise company in a future blog entry.

Along comes a critical use case this past week.  MS08-67 came out and threw most companies I know of into some serious chaos while they rolled this patch out ASAP.  Now this one does impact any Windows OS including Server Core.   Anyone that would be using Hyper-V would obviously be affected right now.    Let’s walk through trying to deploy this for 120 Hyper-V hosts with Quick Migration (which causes a service interruption) as fast as humanly possible with business buy-off to do this ASAP outside of Maintenance Zones.