Solution Guide: A Mixed Server Workload on Hyper-V and NetApp Fabric MetroCluster

Today, IT organizations’ major challenges can be summarized in three major areas of business: server consolidation, business continuity and disaster recovery, and testing and development. Typically, all three areas revolve around one primary business case: efficiency. Achieving efficiency in asset management and resource utilization is one of the major reasons why IT organizations look into virtualization.

This design guide discusses the three major business areas in a Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V on NetApp MetroCluster environment and provides a view of Microsoft and Hyper-V components to construct such a system. Some key benefits of the overall solution are

This document showcases the simplicity of architecting a robust infrastructure with Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V in a virtual environment with NetApp storage, to provide the ability to maintain HA for both the computing and storage resources between the primary and secondary sites and complete disaster recovery in the event of the loss of a whole site.

This document also describes various failure scenarios showcasing the value of deploying Windows Server 2008 R2, Hyper-V live migration, and NetApp MetroCluster to recover from these failures. Each failure scenario simulates real-world operational failures and real disasters. The expected outcome and actual results are described in terms of MetroCluster product operation and the resulting behavior of Hyper-V servers and virtual machines (VMs).