Now that we've covered how to design and plan your virtual machines, we're going to turn to the host's view of things. There are add-on and third-party tools that can perform automatic load balancing, but a failover cluster of Hyper-V Servers will only perform balancing in response to a failover event. Whether you'll use automated tools or not, you'll need to have an understanding of your host's abilities.

Balancing is not the entire story. Even if you have additional tools that can perform load balancing for you, you'll still need to keep abreast of the performance metrics of your cluster. As new virtual machines are added, your total capacity will be lessened and you'll want to know well in advance if you need to add hardware. Remember that your cluster is probably intended to survive the loss of at least one host without negatively impacting virtual machines, so just having a fully functional cluster with sufficient capacity may not be...