An overhead concept to failover clustering that is important to understand is the different tiers at which clustering can benefit you. There are two levels upon which you can use clustering: you can take an either/or approach and use just one of these levels of failover clustering, or you can combine both to really impress your high availability friends.
Clustering tiers
Application-layer clustering
Clustering at the application level typically involves installing failover clustering onto VMs. Using VMs is not a firm requirement, but is the most common installation path. You can mix and match VMs with physical servers in a clustering environment, as long as each server meets the installation criteria. This application mode...