Automatically Live Migrate Multiple Virtual Machines in a Hyper V Cluster

Over the Christmas break, I decided to use the time off to carry out some essential maintenance of our 3 Node Hyper V Failover Cluster that we currently have in our datacentre (I know, sad as I am working over the holidays!).

What I wanted to do was to update all of the Hyper V hosts with the latest HP Support Packs and Firmware updates, install the latest Windows Updates and Patches and also run scripts to identify which hotfixes are missing that are specific to Hyper V, Clustering and SCVMM (see this link for a really handy script that I recommend any Hyper V admin to use regularly - http://kevingreeneitblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/hyper-v-and-scvmm-missing-updates.html).

With all of these updates to be applied to the Hyper V hosts, it means in that although there will be no need for downtime of the virtual machines on each host (approx 15 VM's on each one), I will still need to 'Live Migrate' these machines to the other Hyper V hosts before I add the updates and reboot the hardware.

This 'Live Migrate' process can be a tedious process as unlike VMWare's VMotion, you cannot 'Live Migrate' any more than one virtual machine at a time from a physical host to another - you can 'Live Migrate' more than one virutal machine at a time within a Hyper V cluster but not more than one VM from each physical host. For example, I can migrate a VM from Host 1 to Host 2 and at the same time, I can migrate a machine from Host 3 to Host 4 as long as each host only has one 'Live Migration' occuring at any given time.

With a large amount of VM's to 'Live Migrate', clicking on each VM one at a time and waiting for it to migrate before you can do the next one is a time consuming process and a waste of valuable time over the Christmas holiday period!

As previously mentioned, although you cannot 'Live Migrate' more than one virtual machine at a time in a Hyper V cluster from one host to the other, there are several ways that you can automate this process with a couple of clicks of a mouse that will systematically move each virtual machine to a different host without the need for you to do each VM one by one.

My preferred method of automating this process requires that you have Microsoft's System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 managing your Hyper V cluster (shame on you if you don't!).

I remembered reading through the SCVMM documentation a while back and coming across a feature for host management called 'Maintenance Mode'. Maintenance Mode allows you to specify if a host is going to be offline within your Hyper V cluster and when you enable Maintenance Mode on a particular Hyper V host, a wizard pops up explaining that this process will automate the 'Live Migration' of your virtual machines to another physical host. Just the solution I was looking for!

Simply browse to the 'Hosts' section from within SCVMM, right mouse click on the host, select 'Maintenance Mode' from the menu and then follow the wizard to move all machines automatically.

There is another way to automatically move all the Virtual Machines from one Hyper V host to another but that involves pulling the power cables from the back of the host and I really don't recommend to do that....................

Now, back to enjoying the time off work!