TechNet Partner Forums: Hyper-V Failover Cluster Network Recommendations

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• TechNet Forums: Hyper-V Failover Cluster Network Recommendations

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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

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Best regards,
Lamb Shu
Partner Online Technical Community
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