Improve your Hyper-V Virtual Availability - Live Migrate VMs on Shutdown

Hyper-V clustering is a pretty rock solid thing, and Live Migration is virtually identical to VMWare's VMotion technology - pick up a running VM, and move it to another host in the cluster without users noticing. Generally speaking you might see a small hiccup - one ping lost as the machine stops on one host and starts on another.

But if you shut down a cluster host, say, because you're deploying a Windows Update, or a new version of a backup or monitoring client, the situation is different. Windows will use Quick Migration to move the virtual machines from one host to another - and Quick Migration is nothing like VMotion and Live Migration.

Instead of copying the VM memory and processor state across the network, the virtual machine is saved (to your SAN) on one host, then restored from that saved state on another. The difference is obvious:

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