Availability Set in System Center 2012 SP1 - Virtual Machine Manager

As you may be aware of, SP1 for System Center 2012 is now available in Beta.

The first thing I will dig into is the new features in VMM and share the good stuff with you.

First thing first is the ‘availability set’ on the hardware profile for the VMs.

Finally, we can have a deeper cluster integration with VMM and create and manage this with this premium management tool.

In other words, if you have a distributed application – or anything else that should not be located on the same cluster node, you can create an availability set.

So what does this give?

VMM have some optimization techniques like Dynamic Optimization and Power Optimization.

Especially the dynamic optimization option will be a good friend of you once you enable it, to distribute and re-balance the workloads among a Hyper-V Cluster.

If you have created an availability set, dynamic optimization will not mess up your configuration and place the VMs on the same node. Together with the option to set preferred and possible owners of virtual machines, VMM will always attempt to keep those virtual machines on separate hosts to secure uptime for your services.

This is a well-known cluster setting that we have wanted to see in VMM for a long time.

When you have created an availability set you might also be glad to know that you can also prioritize those virtual machines. When a virtual machines is defined as ‘high priority’, the cluster will then start and place those virtual machines before medium and low-priority virtual machines. Hyper-V uses values from CPU, Memory and also NUMA to give the virtual machines best possible performance compared to virtual machines defined as medium or low.

 

This is just one part of the goodie pack in SP1 for SC 2012.

More to come.