Hyper-V and Failover Clusters

I've been doing quite a few talks on Hyper-V recently - which if you know me, means a couple of PowerPoint slides and a load of demos.

I've finally gotten around to encoding my demos - so here they are:

First (just so you know there's no smoke and mirrors), I build the cluster:

Click to start, double click anywhere to play it in Full Screen and move your mouse over it to get the Player Controls to pop up.

My cluster is built using three laptops:

Daven-2008 is running Windows Server 2008 and hosts a domain controller and an iSCSI SAN.  The iSCSI Target is offering 31 LUNs (which are VHDs sitting on a 5400rpm external USB drive) to the iSCSI Initiators.  I manage the cluster and Hyper-V from here.  Daven-Node1 & Daven-Node2 are both running Windows Server 2008 - Server Core and are connected to the iSCSI target.

Next, I create a Virtual Machine and make it Highly Available.  I then fail it between nodes, just to show what happens:

Click to start, double click anywhere to play it in Full Screen and move your mouse over it to get the Player Controls to pop up.

And finally, just to dispel the myth that a Microsoft Cluster is limited to 26 drives (one per letter of the alphabet), I do it again:

Click to start, double click anywhere to play it in Full Screen and move your mouse over it to get the Player Controls to pop up.

Hyper-V is just a role that you install onto Windows Server 2008.  It works very closely with Failover Clustering to provide both High Availability and Quick Migration.  Quick Migration, as you can see, is the ability to fail a running Virtual Machine from one physical cluster node to another with very little downtime.

Hyper-V is currently at a Release Candidate stage and will be finished soon (fingers crossed).

Dave