SFHAW in a Virtual Machine environment (Vmware)

[gothicreader]

Hi:

I'll try not to confuse anyone with my question. 

I've created two virtual machine (W2K3) which will be used for MS Exchange, with the appropriate NIC requirements for both public and heartbeat. 

1) Vmware ESX3.5 has a limitation on PCI devices, which doesn't allow for more than 6 devices.  Therefore, after creating the storage disks, two public NIC and one reserve device that ESX uses - I'm unable to create the heartbeat NIC. 

2) So, to get around this limitation I created the two heartbeat NIC within the virtualmachine operating system using Microsoft Loopback adapter.  However, when I try to configure the VCS heartbeat - VCS shows them a group (teamed) of NICs which prevents me from configuring since the requirement is two heartbeat NICs.  Although, in the product documentation it does mention that you can get away with one heartbeat NIC.  I did not team these NICS, so this is something that VCS is doing on it's own. 

3)  I know the above configuration works (at least in ESX 2.5) since I did create a Veritas Clustering solution with HA for Exchange in a virtual environment.

4)  My question is, how do I overcome this limitation since I can't proceed any further with the configuration of these servers. 

Thanks,
Judy

 

[wheim · Accepted solution]

Hi Judy,

If you are trying to setup a two node cluster, don't use the Microsoft Loopback adapters.  They will not be able to be used to communicate between the two nodes.

Configure you VMs are you described in item 1 with 2 public and 1 dedicated heartbeat.  Then you can use VCW to configure a low priority heartbeat with one or both of the public nics.  You can also setup LLT over UDP heartbeats if you want.  You can configure LLT over UDP heartbeats with the 5.1 version of VCW or manually if you are using an older version of the product.

Thanks,
Wally