Introduction

The adoption of and migration to the virtual environment has been implemented by almost all companies nowadays. Virtual servers provide benefits such as lower energy consumption, datacenter space, and costs. On the other hand, it can be very dangerous, since lots of virtual machines running on just one server creates a single point of failure. In this example, if a server with heaps of virtual machines is down, not only is one system affected, but also all VMs running on that server.

The good news is that Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V come with the right tools and high availability solutions for almost all scenarios. In fact, Hyper-V and Failover Clustering are so deeply integrated, that in previous Windows Server versions, some of the features in Failover Clustering were only meant for Hyper-V use. This has also been improved in Windows Server 2012, so that you can take advantage of new features such as Hyper-V over SMB, built upon CSV2.0.

Small offices or huge datacenters...