Saturday 14 January 2012

TechNet Partner Forums: Hyper-V Failover Cluster Network Recommendations

This is a post on the TechNet Forums:

A direct copy and paste from the forum post with emphasis added by us:

Thanks for your post. I'm Lamb from Microsoft Partner support team.

From your description, you need an official recommendation of how we design the Hyper-v Cluster Networks. If I misunderstand it, please correct me.

First, I'd like to answer your question:

Q: "whether or not Microsoft still recommends a dedicated heartbeat / cluster network"

A: Yes, we recommend. But the requirement is removed.

Simply speaking, it is just an option.

Client access does not interfere with heartbeat, etc. Heartbeat can be running on either network ,where clients can access.

The suggestions below should help you more.

If you have more questions, please feel free to post back.

More suggestions:

1. I think that this article should solve your problem in the post, perfectly:

Hyper-V : How many network cards do I need?
http://blogs.technet.com/b/gavinmcshera/archive/2011/03/27/3416313.aspx

2. To understand how heartbeart co-works with client-access, I think that you need to read the following article.

This article tells you how to decide how we use a Network in a cluster.

Modify Network Settings for a Failover Cluster
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc725775.aspx

3. And, each network has a priority/metric.

Normally, this metric is decided by cluster itself.

And, for CSV&Live-migration, you can decide which network to use.

For CSV:
Designating a Preferred Network for Cluster Shared Volumes Communication
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff182335(WS.10).aspx

For live-migration:
search for "To configure a cluster network for live migration" in:
Hyper-V: Using Live Migration with Cluster Shared Volumes in Windows Server 2008 R2
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd446679(WS.10).aspx

4. And, we can manually change the metric, according to this article:

Configuring Network Prioritization on a Failover Cluster
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/clustering/archive/2011/06/17/10176338.aspx


Best regards,
Lamb Shu
Partner Online Technical Community
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We hope you get value from our new forums platform! Tell us what you think:
http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/partnerfdbk/threads
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Hat Tip: Susan Bradley

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

No comments: