Microsoft Hyper-V Server and Microsoft Failover Clustering are two powerful technologies that, when combined, provide great opportunities to protect your computing workloads and to more fully exploit your hardware resources. These technologies encompass a large number of concepts with an attendant terminology bank. Mastery of these concepts and terminology are critical to properly utilizing the technology.

Another vital component of a successful deployment is planning. A document that codifies the constituent steps of the project is a simple way to guide its progress and keep it on target. The success of a project can almost always be measured by the quality of the planning that went into it.

To understand a Hyper-V Server cluster and to properly plan to deploy one, you must possess an awareness of the components and resources that it will require.

Once you have successfully defined the parameters of your project, you are ready to move on to designing a cluster that fulfills them. This will be the focus of the next chapter. If you are building a project document, it is not necessary—in fact, it is not recommended—that you finalize the goals and purposes portions prior to moving on to design. These sections should be fairly firm at this point, but you should also allow for situations that you encounter during design to influence these earlier parts.