Migrating Virtual Machines and Containers

The Parallels physical server is the system with higher availability requirements in comparison with a typical system. If you are running your company mail server, file server, and web server in different virtual machines and Containers on one and the same physical server, then shutting it down for hardware upgrade will make all these services unavailable at once. To facilitate hardware upgrades and load balancing between several Parallels servers, the Parallels Cloud Server software provides you with the ability to migrate virtual machines and Containers from one physical server to another.

Parallels Cloud Server is shipped with a special utility— pmigrate— allowing you to perform different types of migration. Using this utility, you can migrate

• Containers from one physical server to another
• Parallels virtual machines from one physical server to another
• a Container to a Parallels virtual machine
• a Parallels virtual machine to a Container
• a physical server to a virtual machine or Container
• Xen virtual machines to Parallels virtual machines

All these operations are described in the following subsections.