Hyper-V Clustering

Hyper-V host cluster provide high availability of VMs, I assume you are referring to them as services here. Here's what you are able to do with VMs on a properly configured cluster.
1. You can distribute the VMs between the Hosts but one VM will remain active on only one Host at a time.
2. You can move (Quick-some downtime, Live- No downtime) VMs between the servers.

If you want to make a service within a VM highly available, you can have cluster (NLB, Server Cluster) the service, if the service supports clustering. Clustering of this sort is referred to as guest cluster.

Hope that helps.
Regards,
Shahid

Thanks for the reply.
Here is the scenario:
Let say I have two hyper-v hosts (H1 & H2) which have been clustered to provide email services like Exchange 2010.  From the above scenario, which behavior that the Hyper-V Clustering falls?:-
1. the two Hyper-V host is actually processing the email request for the entire company in round-robin manner?
OR
2. Only H1 will handle the request, whatever H1 has will be cloned to H2?
OR
3. H1 & H2 will handle the request in 1st come 1st serve manner?

Please advise.

TQ.

There are two types of failover situations in Hyper-V Server 2008 R2:

1: Online: Perform a Live Migration of the VM to another node. Perform a Live Migration of CSV Storage to another node.
2: Offline: Node fails, VMs need to failover to another node. There is no time for the VM to be transferred as per Live Migration, so it is just like the hardware was powered off. The VM OS will boot up on another node.

As mentioned, your VM will have an owner node. You can designate that node as well as the preferential node for failover in the VM Application's properties.

Philip

I will try to break it down and then answer your question.
Hyper-V is a (bare-metal, hardware-assisted) virtualization platform from Microsoft. Its good for consolidating physical workloads as virtual machines. The (Virtual) machine itself is not hyper-V aware, meaning it doesn't know if it is running as VM or on a physical machine.
Windows Failover Clusters let you cluster services/resources for high availability, between to or more nodes. One instance of a clustered service failover (or failback) between nodes, minizing or eliminating downtime for service users.
Hyper-V Failover Clusters: With the advent of Win2008, VM (running on Hyper-V) are now also available as a clustered resource and therefore you can have highly Available VMs.
Coming back to your question:
You can run Exch 2010 in a VM running on a Hyper-V host or Hyper-V host cluster, in both cases it is still a VM, which in the later scenario has the ability to failover to another node.
So it neither 1, 2 nor 3.
I Think I can get away with saying that
"think of it as a physical machine, running in a datacenter having the ability to fly to another datacenter if the first datacenter goes down."

Can you tell me what exacty is it that you are trying to achieve.
Regards,
Shahid

Initially I was thinking clustering on Hyper-V host (which involves two nodes), that will achieve kinda load balancing.  In my scenario, meaning that two machines will handle all email processing.

Based on my scneario, from what I understand from you all:
1. there is no improve on the speed of email processing.
2. only H1 will handle all email processing.
3. H2 will take over H1's role when H1 is down.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Thank you.

{Pleae ignore the post ID:  32118632}

Initially I was thinking clustering on Hyper-V host (which involves two nodes), that will achieve kinda load balancing.

Based on my scneario, from what I understand from you all:
1. there is no improve on the speed of email processing.
2. only H1 will handle all email processing.
3. H2 will take over H1's role when H1 is down.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Thank you.