Clustered Hyper-V Server High Availability

The primary drawback of server virtualization is that system outages can affect multiple machines simultaneously. To protect your environment against such impact, you can implement Hyper-V by using the Windows Server Failover Cluster role, which provides automatic recovery in the event of a server failure. This architecture offers two main benefits:

It greatly simplifies the management effort required to recover applications after an outage.
It enables you to use Hyper-V live migration to proactively move VMs between host servers for better application scaling.

Common clustering architecture for Hyper-V

A Microsoft failover cluster requires a shared SAN that all hosts of the cluster can access. HPE Nimble Storage arrays offer a high-performance, fault-tolerant storage platform that is fully compatible with Microsoft clustering. To ensure compatibility with your server platform, follow the Microsoft best practices for implementing the cluster.

Note: Hyper-V on Windows Server enables you to perform live migration and live storage migration of running VMs without requiring shared storage. However, these technologies are best used for proactively migrating VMs, and they do not provide high availability in the event of host failure. Shared storage, such as HPE Nimble Storage CS-Series arrays, is a requirement for high availability within a Hyper-V clustered environment.