Features of a Highly Available Hyper-V Installation

The solution described in the guide offers the following primary benefits:

Support for Hyper-V live migration. In a block-based (iSCSI or Fibre Channel) storage environment, Hyper-V requires the Microsoft Failover Clustering feature to perform live migration between host servers. Live migration greatly reduces the amount of effort required to migrate server data during maintenance, load balancing, or hardware consolidation. The migration does not interrupt services or interfere with the server's ability to process data.
Support for Hyper-V live storage migration. Hyper-V can natively relocate VHD-based storage that is attached to a virtual machine (VM) and all of the files needed to run that machine, such as the configuration file, from their existing location to a new location. Both the source and destination locations can be either block-based storage (iSCSI or Fibre Channel) or an SMB 3.x file share that supports the Continuous Availability (CA) feature. The CA feature allows a Hyper-V VM to evacuate an existing storage device and populate a new storage device. When the storage move is complete, the VM is still hosted on the same physical server. From that point on, however, the server consumes space from the destination storage location instead of the original storage location. This operation does not interrupt services or interfere with the server's ability to process data.
Performance policies. Traditional storage devices force application writes into static-sized block containers or page containers that do not optimize storage space. The patent-pending HPE Nimble Storage CASL file system uses variable-length blocks that match application write sizes precisely to maximize storage space. Variable-length blocks combined with real-time inline compression greatly reduce the footprint for data storage, snapshots, and replication, enabling you to store more data and reduce bandwidth costs, especially over wide-area networks (WANs).
SCSI UNMAP. This functionality enables you to reclaim storage space on thin-provisioned volumes when data is deleted.
Application awareness. Storage replication by itself can put your data at risk for applications that perform transactional write processes, such as databases. HPE Nimble Storage arrays provide application integration to ensure that applications properly flush their write buffers to a quiescent state before point-in-time operations, such as snapshot backup and replication, are triggered.
Zero-copy cloning. HPE Nimble Storage arrays greatly reduce the amount of storage required for VMs by eliminating duplicate files that are common to multiple operating system images.
High availability. When a system failure occurs, Failover Clustering automatically restarts VMs on surviving hosts. This capability reduces the amount of effort required to manually perform virtual server recovery. HPE Nimble Storage arrays fully support the Failover Clustering and Hyper-V technologies, providing high-speed fault-tolerant storage.
Offsite disaster recovery. When you use HPE Nimble Storage WAN-efficient replication to recover production applications to an offsite disaster recovery location, you achieve fast recovery and business continuity cost-effectively in the event of a catastrophic site outage.