W2K3 Cluster Setup - Networking

[Tom Barnard]

I have 2 blades I wish to setup in a cluster, both NIC's are maped to CISCO switches in the first 2 bays.

How do people sugest setting up the networks? Dedicate 1 NIC to heartbeat only on 1 switch, using a sepearte IP range?

[Mike Bollman_1]

Personally I would team two nics together for the public interface in failover only mode. I would then establish 2 separate networks for a primary heartbeat and a secondary heartbeat network.

I would then configure the cluster to use the primary heartbeat nic first, secondary heartbeat nic second and the public interface third for heartbeat.

and yes I would make all 3 NIC/teams be on separate "networks" or vlans.

example:
public teamed interface: 10.96.100.x
heartbeat primary: 192.168.1.x
heartbeat secondary:192.168.2.x

You also want to make sure that the heartbeat and public nics are running across the separate switches

example:
switch A should have public A and primary heartbeat
switch B should have public B and secondary heartbeat

[Steven Clementi]

I agree with Michael and have used this configuration in the past many times.

You do not want to team your nic's for a single heartbeat connect, always opt for 2 separate heartbeats.


Steven

[Tom Barnard]

How do I acheve this with 2 NIC's? Just assign a second IP to each interface?

[Steven Clementi]

I guess we should have asked which blades you had first. Sounds like a BL35?


With only 2 nics, simply use the first one for your public connection and second for your heartbeat.

If you must have redundant public connections, make both nics public and designate one or both as heartbeat in the cluster configuration. You only need to set the public IP address.


Steven