There’s a blogger out there who used to claim that the only reason he wouldn’t consider Hyper-V as an enterprise virtualisation solution was because he couldn’t set the ordering of automatic VM startup during a failover scenario, e.g. start up the SQL server, then the middle tier server, then the web server.
Windows Server 8 Hyper-V Failover Clustering has this feature, enabling you to set VMs into one of 4 buckets and thus order their startup when they failover from one host to another:
- High: These VMs start up first
- Medium: The default, and they start up after the high priority ones
- Low: These VMs start up after the high and medium priority VMs
- No auto start: These VMs fail over but do not start up automatically
How does it work? Check it out for yourself: