I recently setup a server in our Edinburgh office that was connected to a Dell MD3000i to act as a HyperV host for a number of “low end” guests like our voice manager PC, Antivirus server, and to house those Desktop servers that we all have sitting in our racks in our data centres. We had a couple just services that run on Windows XP but need to be switched on and logged on 24/7.
Originally the server was setup as a single server with 10 guests on it but it became apparent that if that server did fall over, although those Virtuals would still exist on the MD3000i it would still be an issue getting them up and running on another host. Any how another server became available recently so I took this opportunity to re-deploy it and create a cluster with the current HyperV host and this additional server. Both servers have 16GB RAM the primary node has 2 x 2.5GHz Quad Core Processors and the secondary node only has 2 x 1.86GHz Quad Core Processors but can happily run the guests.
I set up the cluster and then using the Virtual Machine Management Console I migrated the storage to shared storage on the same array jsut storage that was part of the cluster. and at no extra cost to the Firm I have now given then a highly available system. The benefit of this not only reduces resources needed in the data centre but also gives me a great proof of concept for when I want to look at virtualising a lot of the key servers in our data centre when it comes to support contract renewal.
Just to mention I am using Windows Server 2008 R2. and some of the features that you get with HyperV R2 make it a truly great product to use Live State migration rocks :)