How to Configure Preferred and Possible Owners for a Virtual Machine on a Host Cluster

Updated: May 13, 2016

Applies To: System Center 2012 SP1 - Virtual Machine Manager, System Center 2012 R2 Virtual Machine Manager

Starting with System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 (SP1), if you deploy virtual machines on a host cluster, you can use Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) to configure preferred owners and possible owners for the virtual machines. By default, there are no preferred owners (there is no preference), and the possible owners include all nodes (servers) in the host cluster.

For information about other settings related to availability of virtual machines on a host cluster, see Configuring Availability Options for Virtual Machines Overview.

Account requirements To complete this procedure you must be a member of the Administrator or Delegated Administrator user role, or a self-service user who has the Deploy action in the scope of their user role.

To configure preferred and possible owners for a virtual machine

1. In the VMs and Services workspace, navigate to the host on which the virtual machine is deployed. In the results pane, right-click the virtual machine, and then click Properties.

2. Click the Settings tab and configure the options:

   • To control which nodes (servers) in the cluster will own the virtual machine most of the time, configure the preferred owners list.

   • To prevent a virtual machine from being owned by a particular node, configure the possible owners list, omitting only the nodes that should never own the virtual machine.

3. In the properties sheet, click OK.

4. To verify the settings, reopen the properties sheet.

Creating and Deploying Virtual Machines Overview
Configuring Availability Options for Virtual Machines Overview