The adoption of live migration to a highly virtualized environment is all but commonplace by most companies nowadays. Virtual servers provide benefits such as lower energy consumption, datacenter space, and lower costs. On the other hand, it can be very dangerous, since lots of virtual machines running on just one server creates a single point of failure. In this example, if a server with heaps of virtual machines is down, not only is one system affected, but all the VMs running on that server are also impacted.

The good news is that Windows Server 2016 and Hyper-V comes with the right tools and high availability solutions for almost all scenarios. In fact, Hyper-V and Failover Clustering are so deeply integrated that, in previous Windows Server versions, some of the features in Failover Clustering were only meant for Hyper-V use. This has also been improved in Windows Server 2016, so that you can take advantage of new features such as Hyper-V over SMB with Storage Spaces Direct (S2D), built upon Clustered Shared Volumes (CSV).

Small offices or huge datacenters in different locations: it doesn't matter which environment you are working in, you will find the correct configuration to make sure your servers are protected from any disaster that may occur, including natural disasters that can rip your datacenter off the map. The interesting thing is that all these magical tools and configurations are offered out of the box, without the need to install third-party applications or expensive third-party software.

In this chapter, you will see how to create block and file storage in Windows Server 2016 for low-cost storage, and how to prepare and configure a failover cluster for Hyper-V, CSV, and other interesting things, to provide a high-availability Hyper-V environment.