ESXi 4.1 with MSCS

[DavidRiberdy]

We are looking at deploying some servers with MSCS but am not sure if we can with only 4 NICs in the servers we are using.  Currently we have 1 NIC for the Management Network, one for a redundant Management Network and vMotion and two in a vDS for the virtual machines per server.  VMware says that you need two physical network adapters dedicated to the MSCS cluster and to the public and private networks.  Can I set those up as VLANs on the existing NICs or would I need to add more NICs to meet these requirements?

[Craer]

This is probably the best place to start:

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r41/vsp_41_mscs.pdf

Im assuming you want to cluster the VM's across 2 physical hosts.  In that case you will need 2 dedicated nics, 1 for public and 1 for private.  Page 24 figure 3.2 has a good diagram of the configured setup.

[DavidRiberdy]

The diagram shows that I need two physical NICS that flow through two vNICS to the VMs.  Instead of the two seperate switches, could I not use two Port Groups off of the same vDS using different VLANs?

and yes, this would be across two or more  physical servers that are in a DRS/HA environment.

[a_p_]

I'm sure it would technically work with the two VLANs, however IMO the reason for the 2 separate physical uplinks is to make sure there's a continuous MSCS heartbeat even if an uplink fails. If both, the public and the private network share the same uplink, you might run into a MSCS failover if the failover to the second pNIC on the vSwitch isn't fast enough. Unless you cannot make sure you use different uplinks for the private and the public network, there's no need for the private network at all.

André

[AndreTheGiant]

See also:

http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-10055