Hyper-v management confusion..

[Gammawolf]

Hi there,

Just a general question regarding the hyper-v 2012 management tools.. say i had 4 dual socket hypervisors that i wanted to run hyper-v on and do some VM clustering on.. What tools would I need for easy system/cluster and VM management? As far as i know there are these routes?

1) Free Hyper-v and powershell
2) Free Hyper-v and Systems Center (this is licensed per server?)
3) Hyper-v standard with Hyper-v manager (GUI server install and just add the features)
4) Hyper-v datacenter with Hyper-v manager (GUI server install and just add the features)
5) Options 3 and 4 coupled with Systems Center?

+ i guess could you remote manage any of these from a Windows 8 PC with hyper-v installed? Would that enable you to manipulate the cluster as a whole or just hosts?

Are these paths right and which ones allow what you'd expect to get features wise from a cluster? Such as HA, fail over for hosts, live VM migrations etc?

Sorry about all that, hyper-v noob here!

 

[oddjob62]

+ i guess could you remote manage any of these from a Windows 8 PC with hyper-v installed? Would that enable you to manipulate the cluster as a whole or just hosts?

Are these paths right and which ones allow what you'd expect to get features wise from a cluster? Such as HA, fail over for hosts, live VM migrations etc?

I'm assuming you have some kind of shared storage for this cluster.

Once the cluster is set up, you just need to download and install the RSAT tools and you can fully manage the cluster, and yes, all of them give you the failover and live migration features.