In this short blog I’ll show you how to migrate a KVM guest machine from host to another by using virsh(1).

First, install the libvirt-bin package, which provides virsh(1):

$ sudo apt-get install libvirt-bin

A short summary of our hypervisors and guest domain that we use in this post:

• kvm01.example.org - is the first KVM hypervisor
• kvm02.example.org - is the second KVM hypervisor
• guest01 - is the guest domain that we will be migrating

Our guest domain guest01 resides on kvm01.example.org and will be migrated to the kvm02.example.org hypervisor.

Now, there are two possible scenarios for a migration. First one is that you are running your VMs on a shared storage (NFS, GlusterFS, etc.) and in which case you are able to perform a live migration of your guest domains.

The second one is that you are not running your VMs on a shared storage and cannot perform a live migration.

Here we’ll see how to perform a migration of a guest domain with a shared storage and also non-shared storage.

Performing a live migration with a shared storage

Remember, live migration requires a shared storage? If that’s your cause then you are a lucky one.

So let’s do the live migration. Login to kvm01.example.org and execute the command below, which would migrate guest01 domain to kvm02.example.org:

List the guest domains at kvm01.example.org:

root@kvm01:~# virsh list
Id    Name                           State
----------------------------------------------------
2     guest01                        running

And now perform the migration:

# virsh migrate --live --persistent guest01 qemu+ssh://kvm02.example.org/system 

Wait until the migration is over and after that verify that the guest domain has been migrated to kvm02.example.org:

root@kvm02:~# virsh list
Id    Name                           State
----------------------------------------------------
2     guest01                        running

Performing a migration with a non-shared storage

In cases where you do not have a shared storage (like NFS, GlusterFS, etc.) you can still migrate a guest domain from one hypervisor to another. In such cases the migration involves also transferring the guest domain images.

One thing to keep in mind when performing a migration on a non-shared storage is that libvirt would expect that the guest images be created on the destination host already.

So, the first thing you need to do before starting out with the migration is to create the disk images for the guest on the destination host. So, create the disk images either by using qemu-img(1) or the LVM volumes if you are working with LVMs upfront. Once you have that in place execute the command below in order to start with the migration.

$ sudo virsh migrate --copy-storage-all --persistent guest01 qemu+ssh://kvm02.example.org/system

Wait until the migration is over and after that verify that the guest domain has been migrated to kvm02.example.org:

root@kvm02:~# virsh list
Id    Name                           State
----------------------------------------------------
2     guest01                        running

And that should be all!