Configuring 2 servers with 2 2012 standard licenses

techfiend

At work we are in the midst of setting up 2012. The current 2003 setup is 4 vm's on 1 server and the second server is only replicating vm's. The guy in charge of it wants to do the same thing with 2012. I thought something like this would work better but I'm not sure if 2012 works this way.

Server 1
VM1: Internal roles primary
VM2: External roles secondary

Server 2
VM1: Internal roles secondary
VM2: External roles primary

Internal roles would be: file server, ad, dhcp, sql, deployment app (dns? more suited externally?)
External roles would be: iis, wsus, av management

Primary would be setup to failover to secondary, when primary goes down, secondary immediately takes over and is current. Is this how server 2012 failover works or is there a way to achieve what I'm envisioning?

philz1982

Does it have to be a physical server? You could do a replicated server on a VM and just have failover. What SLA do you have? Can you tolerate 4x9, 5x9, 6x9?

techfiend

There's 2 physical servers, same specs, 2x8 core. There's an old third server moving offsite, 2x dual core, that will be daily replicated. There's an old workstation on a big raid5 running veeam doing daily backups. We plan on using esxi but the 2012 standard sla only allows 2 vm's on 2 cpus, we have 2 of these. I'd like to be able to reboot any one vm without disturbing anything.

techfiend

It works as expected at home in virtualbox. Is having the internal and external roles separated and having each server with one vm of each the most optimal way of setting this up within the limits of 2 physical servers and 4 vm's?

netsysllc

You are not limited to 2 VM's of 2012 but instead you have to have 1 license for every 2 VM's. You could have 8 VM's on one server you would just need 4 licenses of standard.