Andreas Ender from SECURE_iT sent me this excellent demonstration video…
Georg Dörn from www.its-doern.at has built a XEN cluster solution.
This Video shows you an RDP session while live migration of a Windows 2008 R2 terminal server running as a virtual machine on a XEN-HA cluster.
Within the RDP session a video is playing while live migrating the terminal server vm from one XEN-HA cluster node to the other node and back again without any downtime.
Only one ping is lost while migrating. You will see a very short stop playing the video at 1:06 and 2:12.
The XEN-HA Cluster is based on two identical Debian 5.0 XEN Hosts with drbd (raid 1 with sata disks and sync with 2 x gbit nic) and heartbeat.
The whole system runs with open source software! This XEN-HA cluster is not any experimental system. It works as a production system at many customers from us.
This is cool, but it’s not actually HA, it’s just live migration. HA would require and automated process to ensure the vm was moved or restarted automatically on another host. If you have say 5 or more hosts, you got some real coding to do to make this automated.