Besides the high availability aspect of virtualization platforms, the other tremendous benefit of today’s virtualization hypervisors is the effective means to load balance and effectively spread around resources. Microsoft Windows Server Hyper-V Failover Clusters provide a powerful platform for not only high availability but also resource scheduling. When determining where virtual machine resources will live, and on which host they are provided, a number of mechanisms can be used to accomplish this effectively.
Quick Bites:
- Hyper-V Failover Clusters offer both high availability and resource-balancing benefits
- Control cluster load balancing through tools like System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) and features like Dynamic Optimization
- Virtual Machine Load Balancing in Windows Server 2016 uses metrics like CPU utilization to migrate VMs for optimal resource allocation
- Hyper-V Preferred Owners and Possible Owners settings prioritize host selection during failover scenarios
- Anti-affinity rules prevent certain VMs, like domain controllers, from being on the same host for increased availability
In this post, we will look at how to effectively determine resource load balancing with Windows Server Hyper-V Failover Clusters. We will also look at several Hyper-V tools that allow configuring and setting up preferences on how host load balancing takes place and how Hyper-V virtual machines are placed in the Hyper-V cluster.
