This brings us to the final section of the chapter on high availability. This was the first of the advanced topics for Hyper-V, and we have more in store for you. The objective of this chapter was to tell you the principles of high availability and what Microsoft offers in this space. Microsoft promotes Hyper-V along with its solid failover clustering as a stable and dependable solution. The HA function is not limited to the host level, and the guest machines running on a Hyper-V cluster can have HA functions enabled for their specific workloads (by utilizing failover clustering or NLB), some of which we saw in the previous chapter.

In this chapter, you learned about the deployment principles of the Windows failover clustering feature, and reviewed the related prerequisites from server, storage, network, and Windows software perspectives. These prerequisites are indispensable to the setup. We also saw how a cluster is identified in the Active Directory, and looked at other related...