I manage two standalone servers running Hyper-V. Honestly, we made the switch from VMware a few months back and things have been going pretty well! The VMs are distributed evenly between these two hosts, and we don't have any shared storage. We also have two additional Hyper-V servers that are just sitting unused. Our routine here is to buy two new servers every three years and migrate the workloads to the new ones, keeping the older ones as backup until the cycle repeats. These older servers are still in good shape; they're just out of warranty now.
For patching, I typically power off the VMs, update the Hyper-V servers, and reboot them. I've been told that Hyper-V can suspend the VMs, but I'll admit that it makes me a bit uneasy. Anyway, I've seen that moving VMs between servers is entirely possible — we've tested it and it's gone smoothly.
My plan is to shift the VMs to the older servers before patching the host and then bring them back. So, I'm curious if there are any downsides to this monthly shuffle, like potential stress on the servers or an accumulation of files or logs that could make this approach impractical? I'd appreciate any insights. Thanks!
1 Answer
Moving VMs between hosts for maintenance and updates is actually pretty standard practice. If your servers are set up in a failover cluster, you can use "Cluster Aware Updating" which can automate the process of moving VMs around while you patch, making life easier for you! Just keep in mind that if you make domain controllers part of the cluster, it can complicate things if issues arise, so it’s better to have those handled separately.
Yeah, CAU works great unless you forget about the DCs in the cluster. Just make sure you have a dedicated DC outside of it to avoid cluster issues.