[Devel] [ANNOUNCE] OpenVZ releases checkpointing/live migration of processes

[Jun OKAJIMA]

>
>OpenVZ team is proud to announce the release of the new 
>checkpointing/restore feature. This feature allows to save (checkpoint) 
>and restore the whole state of a Virtual Environment (VE, container) and 
>do a live migration of a VE to another physical box while preserving 
>process states and TCP/IP connections.
>
>During live migration the in-kernel state of processes and their 
>resources (including memory, registers, IPC, pids, open files, sockets, 
>etc.) is saved and then restored on another machine. Since all network 
>connections are preserved with all the in-progess requests, user doesn't 
>experience interruption of service.
>
>The feature is available on i686 and x86_64 architectures. Migration of 
>32bit VEs between i686 and x86_64 architectures is also supported.
>Current implementation works fine with complex applications like Oracle, 
>Java, X apps.
>
>Latest 2.6.16 OpenVZ kernel and tool packages with live migration 
>support are available here:
>http://openvz.org/download/beta/kernel/
>http://openvz.org/download/utils/
>
>GIT repository for all OpenVZ sources is available at
>http://git.openvz.org/
>
>Usage examples
>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>
>New 'vzmigrate' utility is used for VE migration. Also, new commands for 
>'vzctl' allowing to dump and restore VE were introduced: 'chkpnt' and 
>'restore'.
>
>To save current VE state with all processes:
># vzctl chkpnt <VEID>
>
>To restore VE after checkpointing:
># vzctl restore <VEID>
>
>To perform online migration of VE #101 to another machine:
># vzmigrate --online destination.node.com 101
>without '--online' option vzmigrate does offline VE migration with VE 
>start/stop.
>
>

One Question ---.

Xen needs iSCSI or alike for a FS when you want to do a live migration,
because it needs very same inode mapping.
How about this issue on OpenVZ?
For example, can I migrate a VE to a server which has same file tree on
its HDD, but has different FS type and inode number?

                --- Okajima, Jun. Tokyo, Japan.