For quite a long time, System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) has a feature called Dynamic Optimization. Its main goal is to automatically rebalance VMs between the participating cluster nodes in case the placement is unequal. Now, this feature has partially became available in Windows Server 2016 in the form of Node Fairness. It balances the workloads among the hosts in a Hyper-V Failover Cluster and automatically live migrates guests from an overloaded node to  a less busy one with zero downtime.

Node Fairness goes embedded in Windows Server 2016 and is intended for deployments without SCVMM. SCVMM Dynamic Optimization delivers more versatile functionality than Node Fairness. Regarding this fact, Dynamic Optimization is recommended for balancing workloads among the cluster hosts. However, to use this feature, you need an additional license from the main operating system.

Now that we know what Node Fairness is, let’s take a look at how this service works.