Because of questions from two customers about high availability for Hyper-V virtual machines and NOT similar hardware between the hosts I was clicking around and found an interesting checking tool for processor compatibility for hosts that you want to add into a hyper-v cluster. This is because if virtual machines fail over and they discover they cant run the same processor feature set the failover will fail. And you might find out too late (like when it needs to failover!). Of course the ideal route would be to buy two or more exactly identical hosts and connect those to storage to create the cluster with. But in this case I was asked to check if I could find a combination with not similar machines and see if we can somehow make the virtuals higher available.
So first of all the technet page on hyper-v clustering (classic failover clustering but a page further the CSV live migration is also discussed).
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc732181(WS.10).aspx
And I found this tool the “Virtual Machine Migration Test Wizard”:
http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/VMMTestWizard
With this one you can check in existing clusters, but also adding a machine to an existing cluster or just checking which machines you have running could be placed together in a cluster. This is all based at first on processor feature compatibility and is probably not the only thing you should check for 🙄
And in the comments of that page somebody also made a link to a short video explaining the why and how of this tool:
http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?mkt=en-US&vid=487bbef4-6ab7-4121-91de-c87613014bbb.
So, now lets see if I can play around with this a little.
Bob Cornelissen
