The maintenance and monitoring cycle of your Hyper-V Server cluster deployment is just as important as planning and deployment. In this chapter, we learned how to use freely available Microsoft tools to keep your hosts systems up-to-date. You were also introduced to the concepts involved in selecting monitoring applications and basic ways to leverage built-in components for simplistic monitoring.

In the next chapter, we will use the combined knowledge we've gained so far to examine the high availability capabilities granted by your new Hyper-V Server 2012 cluster environment.