How many VM’s in a Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 cluster?

Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 fully supports clustering. With the addition of enterprise features it has become the ideal virtualization host amongst all Microsoft platform offerings; Windows Server 2008 R2 (Standard, Enterprise, Datacenter), Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2.

A virtualization host supports a maximum of 384 VM’s. However this is not the case when the host is a cluster node. When using clusters, we support a maximum of 64 VM’s per cluster node. So stretching that to a cluster of 16 nodes, we support a maximum of 16 times 64 VM’s on the cluster. That is a total of 1024 VM’s in a cluster. From a clustering design point of view it makes more sense to have 1 or even two passive nodes (one for failure, one for maintenance).

This maximum is true for all virtualization hosts being either Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 or the Windows Server 2008 R2 editions.