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I am still reading up on Hyper V clustering and there is something fundamental I am not understanding.

Windows Fail-over Clustering is supposed to be for high availability only- not load balancing.

Yet I read about some deployments with 7 or more nodes in a hyper v cluster. My understanding was that this is just for high availability, meaning the cluster could sustain many nodes failures. This would also mean that only one node in the cluster is supporting the entire load at a time. But after finding that you can divide VMs between nodes it is starting to look like there is some level of load balancing happening via distributing the VMs.

So my question is do these 7 node or more Hyper V clusters have the VMs evenly divided among all the nodes? And if that is the case does the cluster automatically re-balance the VMs if one fails?

This confuses me because I thought every node in an HA cluster was supposed to be able to support the full load of the cluster.

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  1. A Hyper-V Failover Cluster on it's own does not provide any load balancing of the virtual machines.

  2. You're misunderstanding things a bit. The cluster you're referring to could/would probably not withstand the failure of 6 of the 7 nodes. The cluster could probably handle the failure of several nodes, but it could not withstand the failure of a majority of the nodes.

  3. As for how the virtual machines are distributed between the nodes, without SCVMM it's completely dependent on the people managing the nodes.

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  • So SCVMM is what will automatically distribute the VMs? I read a little about how a Windows private cloud is built with Hyper-V + SCVMM so that makes sense to me. I was just confused because it kind of goes against the fundamental purpose of a purely HA cluster.
    – red888
    Nov 18, 2013 at 16:37
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    Yes, SCVMM can manage the initial placement of the virtual machines and can dynamically optimize the placement of the virtual machines.
    – joeqwerty
    Nov 18, 2013 at 16:55

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