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Highly available Hyper-V in Windows Server 2016
Safety Net
Most of the new features in Windows Server 2016 relate to Hyper-V. Microsoft has introduced numerous changes to make the product even more interesting for companies that have not used virtualization thus far or are running an older version of Hyper-V. To achieve high availability of virtual machines (VMs) on the Hyper-V platform, Microsoft has – from the outset – used the failover cluster services built in to Windows Server. In each version of Windows, Microsoft has consistently developed the functions to optimize the operation of VMs and to ensure permanent fail-safe behavior.
The following changes to the failover cluster services were integrated into Windows Server 2016:
- Virtual Machine Compute Resiliency with cluster quarantine and isolation.
- Cluster OS Rolling Upgrade.
- Workgroup and Multi-Domain clusters, including Cloud Witness with Azure Storage account.
- Host Guardian Service to isolate VMs for different tenants.
- Site-aware clusters with failover affinity, storage affinity, and cross-site heartbeating.
- An improved cluster log with TimeZone, DiagnosticVerbose event channel, and Active Memory Dump.
Two New Cluster Modes
Nodes in a failover cluster regularly communicate with each other and exchange status and availability information through a heartbeat. If a cluster node is no longer working reliably, cluster failover policies decide what to do with the resources (roles) hosted on that cluster node. Normally, a failover of cluster resources to another cluster node takes place.
In Windows Server 2016, Microsoft has introduced two new cluster modes. The first, cluster quarantine mode, checks the state of the cluster nodes. If irregularities in communication occur on one or more cluster nodes, or if the cluster node leaves the cluster, all virtual machines are moved to other cluster nodes by live
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