The technology, sprouting from the Reservoir (Resources and Services Virtualization without Barriers) program, offers a way to move a live, virtualized workload from one server to another, without the need for the two locations to share the same storage space.

"We at IBM Research view this as a huge leap forward because the new open source code enables sharing across domains where shared networked storage and hardware components are not practical," wrote Dr. Yaron Wolfsthal, an IBM research senior manager of system technologies and services who led the development, .

"This is a technology for live service migration which obviates the need for shared storage between the source and target physical machines [which] was previously required by all known migration mechanisms," Wolfsthal said in a subsequent e-mail interview.

Of course, VMware has offered the ability to move a virtual machine from one server to another for a while now, by way of software called VMotion. But this approach has its limits: It requires both the source and the destination hosts to share the same storage device, which limits the range of migration. "To the best of our understanding, vSphere does not support live migration without shared storage," Wolfsthal said.

In fact VMware has been trying to solve the long-distance problem. Last year it said it was that it planned to show off at a Cisco event in San Francisco. "This, of course, is a non-trivial thing to do," VMware said at the time.