Whitepaper: Virtual Server Host Clustering Step-by-Step Guide for Virtual Server 2005 R2

The second whitepaper Microsoft released about Virtual Server 2005 R2 (the first one here) it’s even more interesting since talks about a killer feature still missing in VMware server producs: Virtual Server Host Clustering Step-by-Step Guide for Virtual Server 2005 R2:

This document provides an introduction to the methods and concepts of Virtual Server host clustering.

With Virtual Server host clustering, you can provide a wide variety of services through a small number of physical servers and, at the same time, maintain availability of the services you provide. If one server requires scheduled or unscheduled downtime, another server is ready to quickly begin supporting services. Users experience minimal disruptions in service.

Virtual Server host clustering is a way of combining Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 with the server cluster feature in Microsoft Windows Server 2003. This document describes a simple configuration in which you use Microsoft

Virtual Server 2005 R2 to configure one guest operating system, and configure a server cluster that has two servers (nodes), either of which can support the guest if the other server is down. You can create this configuration and then, by carefully following the pattern of the configuration, develop a host cluster with additional guests or additional nodes.

Get it here.