How to: Ensure Hyper-V live migrations move at “Warp Speed!”

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David Hail over at the PFE Virtualization Blog notes a correlation between BIOS power state settings (c-states) and Hyper-V performance during live migrations:

How long does it take for you to do a live migration between hosts?

I ask that of all the customers I talk to that are using Hyper-V. If your answer is more than 30 seconds, then you should probably look at the settings mentioned below.

He goes on to note the performance decrease that a suboptimal power plan can produce:

[if the host or guest] is not under a heavy load, and it takes longer than 30 seconds to Live Migrate, then this blog post is for you. I have been to some customers where a Live Migration took over 3 minutes – and one of them was even closer to 10 minutes!

Sample power plan settings for HP and Dell servers are provided at the post.

If I were a [virtualized] betting man, I’d bet that general performance might be improved by these settings as well (at the cost of less-deep sleep for the processors). But I’m not, so I won’t.

Posted by Tristan Kington , MSPFE Editor

[Note to self: am I being virtualized? Note from self-Hypervisor: no]