How to allow Hyper-V live migrations

Live migrations allow to migrate running virtual servers from one Hyper-V host to another. Live migrations are not load balancing nor failover clustering, it’s just moving a VM from one host to another requested by admin for example when you buy another host and you want to distribute the load.

How to allow Hyper-V live migrations

Live migrations are disabled by default. So first we have to enable them. Open Hyper-V Manager, select the host on which you want to allow live migrations, and from the right Actions menu click on Hyper-V Settings. Then go to Live Migrations and enable incoming and outgoing live migrations. You can also optionally allow migrations only from and to selected network adapter or you can also specify how many simultaneous live migrations you want to allow.

Change this setting on all hypervisors.

How to allow live migrations from anywhere

Once you’ve allowed live migrations, you can start the migrations from the destination computer. If you want to start the migrations from any computer, including for example some dedicated management computer, you need to set delegation in Active Director and set authentication to Kerberos.

Go to Advanced Features in Hyper-V Settings – Live Migrations and switch Authentication Protocol to Use Kerberos.

Set delegation for Hyper-V migrations

If you want to start the Hyper-V migrations from anywhere, we have to do one more step. Set delegations in Active Directory.

Open Active Directory Users and Computers and find all hypervisors. Open properties of the object and go to Delegation. Here you can choose if you want to trust this computer for delegation to any service and any protocol or if you want to specify it.