AMD today released video and images of Live Migration (VMotion) across three generations of processors. Thanks to AMD-V Extended Migration instructions in the latest generations of CPUs, combined with VMware’s Enhanced VMotion Compatibility feature (released with ESX 3.5 Update 2 last summer) AMD is able to migrate machines running on 65-nm hardware from yesteryear to the latest six-core Opteron “Istanbul” line of processors, yet to be released. VMotion/live migration compatibility is a key in creating future-proof computing clusters running VMware or other virtualization software.
Check out the YouTube video:
AMD Istanbul live migration demo
Intel provides the same functionality under the moniker “FlexMigration”, that allows VMotion to the latest Nehalem CPUs from Xeon 5200 (“Wolfdale/Penryn”) and newer.
There is more information about live migration, including heterogenous live migration, on AMD’s Virtualization blog: blogs.amd.com/virtualization