EDIT: For those that wander in... the answer is YES! Hyper-V is capable of High availability but not by itself. You will need a DAS, SAN, or vSAN for storage.
Most cluster are in 2 nodes for SMB. The settings will involve Hyper V server 2012 R2 + storage. The ideal is to have the Hyper-V run off separate storage (SD CARD or USB) and have VM VHD reside on the storage. With proper configuration on Failover the VM should spin up within seconds the moment heartbeat detected the other server has failed. YES there is downtime but it is very minimal and as the price tag of [FREE] you cannot argue with it. If you need zero downtime then you will need a much more HA or redundancy solution which will cost you more $$$ Cheers!
Original post:
[This is the post I posted on Spiceworks. I like to expand the feedback so per SAM suggestion here is the original post]
This debate has been going on forever and I have seen multiple comparison between the two. What I am looking for is the high availability, or no downtime/live migration, when a host need to be taken down. I know Hyper-V has cluster but is it the same as high availability as VMware?
Our IT consultant recommended 2 servers and 1 SAN + VMware Essential Pro. 2 Servers run us about $2.5k each. 1 San run us about $10-12K for 2.4tb. VmWare Essential Pro license is about $5k. That totaled to $20K! (exclude labor)
I am trying to save some money here and wonder if Hyper-V can be the answer? For our infrastructure we have 2 mission critical servers. 1st is file server. 2nd is for compliance and accounting application. We want to have both server running at all time. Putting both servers as virtual instance onto the same host is not ideal to my boss (who is going to pay for all these stuff).
Ultimately, I am trying to prove that Hyper-V is better in our scenario and we do not need to spend a fortune for it.
Hyper-V clustering seem ideal but can it achieve what VMware high availability does?
these are some link that I have gone through before posting this question:
Hyper-V | Failover clustering
Hyper-V Clustering vs Hyper-v Replicate (I did not go through all the linked sites..)
Server 2012 r2 Hyper-V failover clustering - does it require a SAN?
Hyper-V Cluster Local Storage
Hyper-V cluster + external SAN ?
Starwind & Hyper-v Best practice
Budget is still a thing so I cannot spend a lot. I'm trying to get a solution that is less than $15K total (exclude any labor).
Storage space: 2TB used.. so 4-6TB in RAID10 (SAS10K or SATA7.2K for Hyper-V HA?) 2 hosts with RAM 32GB on each. CPU single E5-2620-v3.
Any thought?