I'm currently preparing to build a W2k3 Cluster on ESX3 across physical hosts. In a VMware whitepaper on building clusters, I'm reading that 2 physical nics are needed. I've never build a 2k3 cluster, but am familiar with W2K clusters. There's a public nic which has the cluster ip en local ip adress. There should also be a heartbeat nic for intercommunication between the two cluster nodes.
My question is:
Is it 'good practice' to make 2 virtual nics which connect to 2 separate virtual switches which connect to nics that are already connected to other virtual switches (such as a backup vswitch). The ESX Servers are limited with 4 nics total and they're all in use:
1. service console
2. network access VMs
3. Backup network for highspeed backups
4. Vmotion backup
All Gigabit. The idea is to combine the heartbeat vswitch with the backup-netwerk vswitch.
Anyone have any experience, or could advise against this approach?
Kind regards,
Mario Verschuur, NL
