The movement of virtual machines between servers is normally used for routine maintenance like upgrading hardware and load balancing. This normally occurs within a single data center. It becomes even more challenging to plan for disaster avoidance in the event of a local catastrophe, because the network manager has to develop an infrastructure for redirecting IP addresses across a WAN.

The main challenge in this scenario, according to Patrick Lin, senior director of product management at VMware, is that the network manager would have to stretch the VLAN across multiple subnets, which is not yet very common.

Moving virtual machines (VMs) between physical servers is extremely common. Anyone with a production environment will need to understand the impact of moving VMs and create workarounds for them. The major problem is that the IT infrastructure becomes more dynamic. Simon Crosby, CTO of the Virtualization and Management division at Citrix, noted that the challenge is configuring the network and storage services that are scattered around within the server itself and then within the components of the infrastructure such as the switches and firewalls.