The World According to Mitch

In the past few months I have written a great deal about creating Failover Clusters for Hyper-V virtual environments.  In this video I will demonstrate how we take a regular virtual machine created in Hyper-V Manager and make it highly available.

The first step that is not recorded in the video is to place the virtual machine files in the proper locations.  The VM in question was originally created on a stand-alone host on a local hard drive… obviously not a good place to start.  I shut down the virtual machine and then exported it to a file share that was accessible to both the original host and one of the hosts in my failover cluster (otherwise known as a cluster node).  Once that was done I imported the virtual machine to the cluster node, using the settings shown here:

These settings ensure that the virtual machine files will be imported into the default locations for my cluster… because I have Cluster Shared Volumes enabled the virtual machine files will be placed into C:\ClusterStorage\Volume1.  The settings also ensure that if I want to create multiple destination VMs from the same source files I can do so because it will create a new unique ID (UID) for the virtual machine.

Once the virtual machine is in the proper location, I can now go through the steps required to make it highly available, as seen in the following video.