Improve your VM workload availability with OCI’s live migration

Organizations need a cloud that can keep up with 24/7 customer demand even when their office lights are off. This high availability cloud requirement is becoming critical as businesses move more and more of their operations to the cloud. At the same time, customers also demand that their cloud providers consistently maintain the physical and virtual infrastructure of the cloud to ensure high reliability, security, and compliance. In today’s competitive environment, organization’s demand both a highly maintained cloud with high availability for their workloads.

OCI has implemented a process called “Live Migration” to meet that demand. Live Migration keeps enterprise workloads up and running for their customers even during routine maintenance events—A time where some Cloud providers’ VMs tend to face downtime in the applications they’re running. 

What is live migration?

Live migration is a process that moves VMs from one physical server to another without any interruption to the running applications. This process ensures that services remain available to customers while OCI performs necessary maintenance tasks, such as firmware updates, hardware replacements, and load balancing.

Benefits of using OCI's Live Migration

By enabling this feature, organizations can enjoy the following benefits:

• Zero downtime for planned maintenance: The most significant advantage of cloud live migration is that it eliminates downtime during maintenance tasks. OCI can perform necessary updates and maintain its cloud fleet without disrupting the customers’ experience. So, cloud infrastructure is up-to-date, and customer workloads remain available.

• Increased availability: Cloud live migration helps OCI increase availability by providing the ability to move their VMs to a server with better resources or less load. So, applications run at optimal levels, providing the best possible experience for customers.

• Improved efficiency: Cloud live migration reduces the need for manual intervention during maintenance tasks, improving overall efficiency for operational teams.

• Cost savings: By eliminating downtime and increasing efficiency, organizations can save money on lost revenue, staff time, and resources. Cloud live migration can be a cost-effective solution for businesses of all sizes.

Are eligible for live migration?

If you’re an OCI customer, you’re eligible for live migration capability! To check whether live migration is compatible with your current OCI configuration, use the following steps:
 

1. Start on the Oracle Cloud Quick Start page and select "Compute" from the dropdown menu.

   

2. Navigate to the "Instances" subheading under Compute.

   

3. Once on the Instance tab, navigate to your instance pools. Select the pertinent instance.
   

4. After double-clicking on your instance, look for Live Migration under Instance Details. If your configuration is compatible, it will read "Enabled."
   

5. If your configuration is incompatible, it will read "Disabled" and the system will list the incompatibilities.
   

Enable your enterprise applications to run seamlessly

Live Migration is now available to enterprises for all Standard compute shapes a more performant and optimized cloud operation, so customers can trust applications are always up and running. For a complete list of shapes supported for live migration see compatible shapes.

To learn more about live migration, see the following resources:

• First principles: Eliminating VM downtime with OCI’s live migration

• Live migration and Reboot Migration: Moving a Compute Instance to a New Host