TuxCare has recently introduced QEMUCare, the live patching solution for when you need to deploy patches to a QEMU-based infrastructure, but the logistics around the maintenance window are just too complex. QEMUCare solves this problem by deploying patches live while the virtual workload is running, with no disruption to virtual machines, users, or other processes.
When you’ve designed your infrastructure with additional capacity just to account for hosts being down for maintenance, or overprovisioned your hosts’ capacity to hold virtual machines while other hosts are being patched, the way QEMUCare works may seem like magic – but it’s not. It’s a practical solution for a common problem, and in fact, a completely new way to address maintenance operations. You simply don’t need these anymore if all you’re doing is deploying patches – no reboots, no disruption, no tricks – just fully patched and secure systems.
Traditionally, to perform updates on one host, system administrators had a couple of options:
- a) they could simply stop the virtual machines, interrupting whatever they were doing, deploy the patches and bring the virtual machines back up, hoping for the best; or
- b) they could live-migrate those virtual machines to other hosts in a very time-consuming process that tied up significant network bandwidth resources, decreased performance and demanded careful orchestration – for example, to ensure that virtual machines providing the basis for a highly available service would not be migrated to the same host. This was both costly in terms of IT staff time and also very error-prone. It’s a whole complexity layer that gets added on top of maintenance work.
Now you have a new and better way to do it. Jay from LearnLinuxTV has tested the solution and filmed a video to showcase how QEMUCare is deployed and how it changes the whole maintenance paradigm.
If you want to know more and arrange for a proof-of-value demo, get in touch with our team HERE.