VBS can manage multi-tier applications in which one or more tiers are managed by Microsoft Failover Clustering. You can create a VBS with Microsoft Failover Clustering tiers, VCS and Application HA tiers, or a mix of these different kinds.

VBS operations treat Microsoft Failover Clustering tiers in the same way as VCS and ApplicationHA tiers. Microsoft Failover Clustering tiers are brought online and taken offline in the same way as VCS or ApplicationHA tiers. However, Microsoft Failover Clustering tiers are allowed to participate only in soft dependencies. Thus, a fault or recovery in a Microsoft Failover Clustering tier will not trigger any action on its parent tiers. VBS does not propagate fault or recovery actions beyond a Microsoft Failover Clustering tier.

Refer to the Fault management overview section for information on how a parent behaves in response to a fault or recovery on its child for various dependency types. The tables in the section also show how a tier propogates a fault to its parent in response to a fault or recovery on its child.

See Fault management overview.

On Windows 2012, cluster.exe (which is not installed by default) must be installed

Provided the failover cluster role is already enabled for the server, you can install cluster.exe from the Powershell console with the Add WindowsFeature RSAT -Clustering -CmdInterface command.

On each Microsoft Failover Clustering that manages applications that are part of a VBS, VOM creates a Microsoft Failover Clustering role called VBSHAService with a single Generic Application resource called vbsapp. The vbsapp resource monitors the VBS daemon running on the Microsoft Failover Clustering and makes it highly available and capable of failing over to other nodes of the cluster.

VOM creates the vbsapp resource with the following properties set to their default values as shown in the table below.

Thus if VBS daemon fails to start properly, then Microsoft Failover Clustering tries to restart the vbsapp resource up to a maximum of three times (RestartThreshold) within the 15 minute (900000 ms) interval (RestartPeriod). Subsequently, it tries to fail over the VBSHAService to another node (RestartAction).