Microsoft Cluster and Physical Nics needed

[UCareVM]

Hello,

We run ESX 4.1 on 1/2 height blades.  These blades have 2 onboard nics dedicated to vMotion and Management traffic.  We add a mezzanine nic dedicated to the virtual machine traffic.  The other mezz has an a storage hba.  No more mezz exists.

Does anyone run a Microsoft cluster on this sort of architecture?  I always adhered to needing separate physical nics dedicated to the Cluster Heartbeat network.

These hosts don't have anymore unused physical nics.  Any ideas or do I need hosts with more physical nics available?

Thanks,

Morrisos

[a_p_]

I assume you use VLANs in your network.

If you want to have the internal MSCS network (heartbeat) on separate physical NICs you may create an additional port group on the management/vMotion vSwitch for it and assign a dedicated (unrouted) VLAN-ID to it.

Example:

vSwitch0: vmnic0 + vmnic2 (one onboard and one Mezzanine port)

port group 1: Management Network - Management VLAN - vmnic0 active, vmnic2 standby

port group 2: vMotion - vMotion VLAN - vmnic2 active, vmnic0 standby

port group 3: VM Network - MSCS heartbeat VLAN - vmnic0 active, vmnic2 standby

vSwitch1: vmnic 1 + vmnic3 (one onboard and one Mezzanine port)

port group 1 -n: VM Network - VLAN n - all vmnics active

André