If you have ever wanted to use Live Migration (LM) and High Availability (HA) you had to have shared storage . This shared storage can be in the forms of SAS, iSCSI or Fiber Channel SAN. For many environments this isn't an issue, but there are some specific scenarios where customers need LM and HA and the cost of a dedicated SAN is a blocker. For example,

  • A branch office environment. It's one thing to setup a dedicated SAN in a datacenter, but what happens when you have 100/500/5000 branch offices? That's a huge multiplier to provide SANs in every one of those branch offices...
  • A small business. Small businesses are especially cost conscious and still want to deploy Hyper-V clustered for the benefits of LM and HA...
  • A test/dev staging environment. Perhaps you want to test your application with LM & HA, but don't have the budget to pay for a SAN.

Wouldn't it be great to have another option? So today, as a big THANK YOU to we are taking another step in lowering the barriers and making it even easier to take advantage of Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V High Availability and Live Migration.  What does this mean? It means you can install the Microsoft iSCSI software target on a Windows Server 2008 R2 system and use it as shared storage for Live Migration. Interested? Here are a few key resources.