Hyper-V cluster

Windows Server 2012 R2, 2016, 2019 and 2022 use a high availability solution with virtual print servers within a clustered Windows Hyper-V environment. Hyper-V clustering is a combination of server virtualization and failover clustering.

Failover clustering with virtual machines (VM) provides a very highly available solution, providing fast and automated recovery, access to shared data and almost no noticeable downtime. It offers high availability for planned downtime, such as servicing, maintenance and upgrades, and for unplanned downtime, such as power outages, system failure or network disconnection.

By separating applications within each VM, the risk of a failed component impacting other services is reduced, and the number of components that need to be patched decreases, further reducing downtime from system reboots. Since it is easy to clone a VM, this simplifies deployment, minimizes configuration error and provides rapid scalability. Virtualization allows a VM to be moved to a different virtual host server with no downtime for the application running within the VM, so the host server can be patched or updated.

In Server 2012 R2, 2016, 2019 and 2022 , the print spooler service is no longer a clustered resource and instead the entire VM with the DRE print server role installed can be migrated from one node in the Hyper-V cluster to the other. Hyper-V clustering provides no service level protection to the print server and print spooler.

A well-designed Hyper-V cluster transparently reroutes user sessions to an available node in the cluster. Highly available solutions allow a user to automatically reconnect to a database if the connection fails. Active transactions roll back, but the new database connection is made on a different node, which is identical to the original. A user notices no loss of connection as long as there is one instance left serving the application.