<p>The blend of Hyper-V and failover clustering provides strong resilience to your organization's critical applications and services. Where Hyper-V provides hardware abstraction, system consolidation, rapid deployment, and simple portability on one hand, failover clustering adds features such as rapid, automated failure handling and downtime-free maintenance for hardware.</p> <p>Building and Managing a Virtual Environment with Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 is a video series designed to present the complexities of Hyper-V and failover cluster configuration in easily digestible chunks. The segments feature demonstrations of the concepts explained in the video, being executed on an actual Hyper-V cluster.<br /><br />You'll begin with the basics of setting up your nodes, gathering them into the cluster, and working with your shared storage system. Then you'll get an in-depth tour of managing your systems using the built-in graphical tools and PowerShell cmdlets. With that foundation, you'll learn advanced concepts of virtual machine migration and cluster protection. You'll also discover detailed maintenance steps, such as how Cluster-Aware Updating keeps your nodes patched without impacting virtual machines.<br /><br />Building and Managing a Virtual Environment with Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 will present you with the knowledge and examples you need to successfully design and deploy your own Hyper-V clusters.</p> <h1>Style and Approach</h1> <p>Packt video courses are designed to cover the breadth of the topic in short, hands-on, task-based videos. Each course is divided into short manageable sections, so you can watch the whole thing or jump to the bit you need. The focus is on practical instructions and screencasts showing you how to get the job done.</p> <p>This is an easy-to-follow set of videos that demonstrate the concepts and techniques of expanding into a fully functional cluster while highlighting the relationship between Hyper-V and failover clustering.</p>