Hyper-V administration and Windows failover clustering

• Master the Hyper-V and Windows failover cluster architecture.
• Deploy and operate a multi-node cluster on shared storage.
• Administer quorum, witnesses and cluster shared volumes.
• Implement live migration and maintenance without downtime.
• Inventory editions and licences across the estate and apply patches.
• Determine the cause of a virtual machine shutdown from the logs.

• Systems administrators and virtualization platform operators.
• Infrastructure engineers and IT operations managers.
• Teams responsible for service continuity.

• Windows Server administration and PowerShell basics.
• Active Directory and name resolution concepts.
• Understanding of TCP/IP networking and iSCSI storage.

Day 1 — Architecture and virtual machines

• Hyper-V architecture: parent partition, child partitions and virtual bus
• Generation 2 virtual machines, VHDX disks and dynamic memory
• Virtual switches, checkpoints and PowerShell automation

Day 2 — Networking, storage and clustering

• Virtual networking, VLANs and NIC teaming
• iSCSI storage and cluster shared volumes
• Validating and building a failover cluster

Day 3 — Quorum, high availability and migration

• Quorum models, witnesses and diagnosing quorum loss
• Live migration, storage migration and anti-affinity rules
• Resilience, automatic failover and node draining

Day 4 — Licensing, updates and backup

• Editions, licences, support deadlines and estate inventory
• Cluster-aware updating and patch management
• Backup strategy, critical exclusions and restore testing

Day 5 — Logging, diagnostics and operations

• Hyper-V logs and determining the cause of a virtual machine shutdown
• Root cause analysis methodology and time correlation
• Diagnostic workshop and writing operating procedures