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Introduction to Live Migrate and Volume Advisor
5 Dell EMC SC Series Live Migrate and Volume Advisor | 3186-BP-SC
1 Introduction to Live Migrate and Volume Advisor
Live Migrate moves a volume from one SC Series array to another without application downtime or disruption
to I/O. It is not dependent on server-side agents, application integrations, or OS features, and is completely
OS and application agnostic. This enables storage administrators to make more efficient use of an SC Series
storage environment by providing the ability to move storage workloads to the most appropriate array for that
workload and point in time.
Live Migrate utilizes some of the underlying Dellâ„¢ Storage Center OS (SCOS) capabilities that power Live
Volume, an SC Series feature that enables SAN volume high availability. Live Volume creates synchronous or
asynchronous live copies of data on separate SC Series arrays, transparently maintaining and swapping the
primary host source. Live Migrate provides a one-time migration of a volume from one SC Series array to
another. Live Migrate is not dependent on Live Volume licensing, and licensing for Live Migrate is included at
the base level.
Volume Advisor is a layer of software intelligence natively built into SC Series arrays. In terms of Live Migrate
federation and data mobility, there are two methods to initiate a Live Migration. Live Migrate can be initiated
manually by selecting a volume or multiple volumes within Dell Storage Manager (DSM). Live Migration can
also be initiated from a recommendation made by Volume Advisor within DSM. Volume Advisor
recommendations are based on thresholds defined by the DSM administrator. When a threshold is exceeded,
an alert is generated by DSM. Depending on the alert, the DSM administrator can choose to follow the
Volume Advisor recommendation to initiate a Live Migration to resolve the problem.
Volume Advisor recommendation to initiate Live Migrate
For a complete list of thresholds that can be defined for use with Volume Advisor, refer to the Dell Storage
Manager Administrator’s Guide available on Dell.com/Support.