Virtualization

centralized storage is a storage every node of your virtualization cluster can access.

so you can do the following:

1. centralized backup (forget the "backup is for whimps" in an enterprise!)

2. if you have the regarding licenses the hosts will populated with the workloads that best performance can be reached (or only the hosts who are needed are populated (saves power))

3. if one host fails the workloads will move to another system.

4. you should have a second centralized storage (or a SAN which can handle this) because if your storage fails the whole cluster is down.

5. in theory W2k12 hyper-V can handle this w/o a central storage but you need much much much much much storage on each host (costs more!)