Best practice in creating MSCS heart beat Network

[AlbertWT]

Hi All,

I'm in the process of building two nodes MSCS cluster VM of windows server 2008 R2, I wonder how should I configure the heart beat network from the ESXi point of view ?

My initial design is to create new Network Label with dedicated VLAN number eg. 127 to make it totally separate from the Network label VLAN IDof the production data and then create one more vNIC with VLAN 127 as the VLAN ID or do I have to make some changes in the Cisco switch / router in this matter ?

[weinstein5]

If the two cluster nodes ate on different ESXi hosts than you will need to configure the cisco switch for the VLAN ID - if the two nodes are on the same ESXi host than no nothing will need to be done to your physical switches

[AlbertWT]

Thanks for the reply David, so in this case yes of course the VMs are spread across two different ESXi host on my HP blades , they are connected to the flex fabric backplane.

So apart from configuring the network label on every ESXi I must ask the network team to make the VLAN ID recognize able and route able.

I tried to use the same Network Label on both vNIC on both VMs but with different IP address on the heart Beat network, so far it's been good.

But of course I am keen to know what is the best practice that is used for this implementation.

[Troy_Clavell · Accepted solution]

you don't need a routable VLAN.  So, ask the network folks to setup a non-routable VLAN in your trunk group.  This way the traffic will stay internal to your vSwitchs and ESX Hosts.

[AlbertWT]

Cool, may I know what is trunk group ?