Understanding how VMM has become a critical part of private cloud infrastructure is very important. This chapter will walk you through the recipes to implement a highly available VMM server, which is especially useful in enterprise and datacenter environments.

VMM plays a critical role in managing private cloud and datacenter infrastructure, which means that keeping the VMM infrastructure always available is crucial to preserving a service's continuity, to provisioning, and to monitoring VMs to respond to fluctuations in usage.

Before VMM 2012, it was not possible to have an HA VMM management server, which resulted in an unavailable service if a VM stopped responding or if the host server restarted, failed, or needed to be shut down for maintenance or patching.

VMM 2012 now allows you to deploy the VMM server on a failover cluster, resulting in highly available services. You can then plan the failover for maintenance purposes, and in the event of a failure, it will automatically...