Make VM Highly Available (VMM 2012)

I get a lot of hits on my blog when people search for «how to make existing VMs highly available» or «make VM highly available» etc. And they usually ends up with the following post: http://kristiannese.blogspot.com/2010/10/how-to-make-your-existing-vms-highly.html

In VMM 2012, this is now easier than ever.

1.       First. If you have a VM that is located on some local storage on your Hyper-V host, you can verify this by looking at the hardware for this virtual machine. Select the VM, click properties and navigate to the hardware tab.

2.       Shut down your VM since VMM actually will do an export/import (yes, the same as you could do with Hyper-V Manager), right click your VM and select Migrate Virtual Machine

3.       Pay attention to this screen shot. You only need to mark the “Make this VM highly available” option, and VMM will trigger the export/import process.

4.       You can also specify CSV and the location for your VHD`s

5.       VMM will now take care of the rest and do what`s required so that your VM can be highly available. You can also choose to start the VM after the job is done

For more information about the migration options in VMM 2012, check out this post: http://kristiannese.blogspot.com/2011/11/explaining-migration-options-in-vmm.html