High-Availability Virtualization With Dell EqualLogic Arrays and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V

For enterprises in a broad range of fields, virtualization has become a popular IT strategy for increasing hardware utilization, enhancing flexibility, and decreasing power, cooling, and data center footprint costs. But while virtualization can offer these and other benefits, running multiple applications on each physical server can place application availability at risk: if a physical server fails, virtualized applications running on that server could become unavailable. In many situations, even temporary downtime for applications can impair worker productivity and jeopardize revenue. At a university, for example, a network outage could prevent administrators from viewing student records or researchers from working with data sets. At a hospital, the inability to access patient records or medical imaging could delay treatment.