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Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

But that's simply not true. 20 years ago you could live migrate processes around a VAXcluster with nary a VM in sight.

But since history does not necessarily flow in one direction, today you need a hypervisor (or experiment with CRIU) to do live migration.

Almost. Although I don't remember the details, IBM has Live Partition Mobility for WPARs on AIX. They were looking for differentiation from Solaris Containers at the time and bought a startup called Meiosys, which had some tech which helped them add live migration to WPARs.

Heh. Even though I work for IBM I wouldn't bother mentioning AIX on HN; it simply doesn't exist inside the echo chamber.

You actually have to buy an add-on called WPAR Manager[1] to enable live mobility; it's not available in baseline AIX. They have been shipping this tech for several years now. Disclaimer: I was on the WPAR Manager dev team for several releases.

[1] http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/software/aix/sysmgmt/wpa...

HN is awesome. Where else do you get someone who had something to do with a project post a comment about it? :)

On Reddit ;-)

And people in the academic world have implemented live migration for just plain Linux processes as well. But when you migrate at that level you run into issues with things like open files and open sockets that are not easy to solve.

LXC is mainly a way to manage multifunction servers in a clean way, and Docker is a nice tool to help you leverage LXC without having to learn all the details. The nicest thing about Docker is that a developer on Windows could set up a VirtualBox VM with Linux, run all the same Docker Scripts as the production server, and have a reasonable facsimile of production to do testing.

Here's an example of process migration implemented in Linux:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOSIX

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