Users Guide

Getting Started with High Availability 7

Getting Started with High

Availability

High Availability (HA) solutions are not new to Windows

environments.

Microsoft

has offered native support for HA through its Cluster Services in

Windows 2000 and Windows Server

2003, and with the Windows Failover

Clustering feature in Windows Server 2008. Failover clustering reduces the

possibility that any single point of failure in your virtualization environment

will cause your workloads to become unavailable. In a non-virtualized

environment, HA implementation was traditionally only done for

environments that were hosting critical workloads because the loss of a non-

critical service hosted on any single physical server was considered acceptable.

However, in a virtualized environment in which a single physical server will

host many virtual machines, the loss of that physical server will result in the

loss of service of multiple workloads. To prevent this scenario, implementing

HA should be a primary goal of any virtualization deployment regardless of

scale or scope, especially in a production environment.

This Dell High Availability Solutions Guide for Microsoft Hyper-V introduces

different options to implement HA for Hyper-V environments, and provides

recommendations and best practices for configuring your Hyper-V HA

environments on Dell hardware.

This Solutions Guide assumes that you have a basic understanding of Hyper-

V as well as the networking and storage concepts of Hyper-V. If you have not

already read them, Dell strongly recommends that you review the following

guides to get an in-depth understanding of Hyper-V solutions on Dell

hardware:

• Dell Solutions Overview Guide for Microsoft Hyper-V

• Dell Networking Solutions Guide for Microsoft Hyper-V

•

Dell Storage Solutions Guide for Microsoft Hyper-V