Clustering is a real requirement for many mission-critical applications. Fortunately, most virtualization platforms (including Microsoft’s Hyper-V) support several options. The main approaches involve either clustering within Guest OS’s (i.e., within a VM if the guest OS supports it), or by using shared storage at the host level. But, clever systems administrators can often come up with some more creative options.
Jose Barreto has recently posted a very well-written and comprehensive article called Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Failover Custering Options. The article outlines (and illustrates) several different approaches. From the introduction:
There are many ways to implement Windows Server Failover Clustering with Hyper-V. I could actually find five unique methods to do it. Some of them will actually not give you a fully fault-tolerant solution, but most of them actually make sense in specific scenarios (even if only for demonstrations). In any case, just trying to understand and differentiate them will probably be a good exercise.
And here are the titles for your clustering options:
- Parent-based Failover Clustering with two physical servers
- Child-based Failover Clustering with two physical servers
- Mixed Physical/Virtual Failover Clustering
- Failover Clustering with two child partitions on one physical server
- Standalone demo laptop with Virtual iSCSI SAN
Jose has done a great job documenting them, and I think this post will serve as a good reference.
