Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V New Features - Provide Better Reliability Capabilities

Another critical area of improvement in Hyper-V is its support for capabilities that improve reliability and recoverability of the Hyper-V host and guest environments. The technologies added to Windows 2008 and Hyper-V are clustering technologies as well as server snapshot technologies.

Clustering is supported on Hyper-V both for host clustering and guest clustering. The clustering capabilities allow redundancy both at the host server level and the Hyper-V guest level, with both areas of clustering greatly improving the uptime that can be created for applications.

Another capability added to Hyper-V for better reliability is the ability to take snapshots of virtual guest sessions. A snapshot allows the state of a guest image to be retained so that at any time an administrator wants to roll back to the state of the image at the time of the snapshot, the information all exists. This capability is used frequently to take a snapshot before a patch or update is applied so that the organization can, if need be, quickly and easily roll back to that image. Snapshots are also used for general recovery purposes. If a database becomes corrupted or an image no longer works, the network administrator can roll back the image to a point before the corruption or system problems started to occur.

Source of Information : Sams - Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V Unleashed 08