Let's start this chapter with an overview of Hyper-V high availability. And to get this overview, let's go back in time, to when Hyper-V was first made available to the public right after the release of Windows Server 2012. With this earlier version of the product, Hyper-V was the first initiative of Microsoft that was a built-in server virtualization tool or server role. Initially, Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V used to support only quick migration (we will discuss quick migration and other types of migration later in this chapter) with the support of Microsoft Clustering Services. But there were a few caveats in this high availability approach, such as that using quick migration, an administrator was allowed to migrate a virtual machine from one physical Hyper-V host to another, but with some downtime, due to the unavailability of true shared storage between clusters.

With Windows Server 2008, when we build a two-node failover cluster by using shared...