Network configuration for Failover Clustering Windows 2012 R2

[joeyd240499]

Hi everyone,

I'm wondering if someone can help me out using their own experience. I plan to install and configure a new VMware system on multiple hosts. This will be used to host 3 SQL Server 2014 servers in an Availability Group.

I am ok configuring the SQL side of things. My question relates to the networking side of things.

Because the networking is made resilient at the physical host level do I need to concern myself with multiple virtual network adapters in the guest OS?

Windows 2012 R2 Failover Clustering looks for a dedicated network adapter for cluster communications, however this can be bypassed.

Speaking to our network people they feel a single virtual adapter will suffice to cater for general network traffic as well as cluster traffic.

Does anyone have any issues with configuring our systems in this manner? I would really appreciate any advice.

Thanks,

Joe

[rcporto]

I will recommend you use another virtual NIC just for heartbeat, since you may get in problems if the primary virtual adapter gets saturated.

Check this blog post: http://blogs.technet.com/b/askcore/archive/2014/02/20/configuring-windows-failover-cluster-networks....

Heartbeat communication and Intra-Cluster communication

Heartbeat communication is used for the Health monitoring between the nodes to detect node failures. Heartbeat packets are Lightweight (134 bytes) in nature and sensitive to latency. If the cluster heartbeats are delayed by a Saturated NIC, blocked due to firewalls, etc, it could cause the cluster node to be removed from Cluster membership.