While i was testing ocfs2 on CentOS 5.1, one colleague of mine asked me if that was possible to have VMware server on top of ocfs2 to test a move from one node to the other node. Of course my first reaction was that vmware-server can't do live migration like esx/vmware infrastructure can .. but because the machines were ready and that it's fast to setup , we did the test.

The first vm refused to start on top of ocfs2 , while the same vm started on local storage. Google pointed me to the correct answer in 3 seconds : you need to include a special parameter in the vmx (vmware guest config file) to have it working on top of ocfs2 . The line to be included is "mainmem.usenamedfile="FALSE" ". You can have more informations on the Vmware forum regarding this.

We then were able to quickly move (by suspending a vm on node1 and resuming it directly on node2) a VM between the two physical machines. Of course that's not live migration, but that's very close to ... and my colleague was happy ;-)