Number of NICs required for Server 2008 R2 Cluster

[mbyrew]

I've discovered that I need to setup a 2008 R2 Cluster to provide access to iSCSI SAN storage and Volunes (LUNS) for hosting .vhd files for VM's created on HYPER-V resulting in high availability and live migration etc. My current configuration is 2 x DELL R410 servers with 2 (two) NICs. These are configured with one for Network Data traffic and the other for the iSCSI LAN.

Do I need a third for the Heartbeat or can the Network NIC be used for this purpose.

[PiqueABoo]

Might be wrong but I believe the network NIC can be used for the heartbeat, but it's not something anyone would do in a serious failover system (where you can easily end up using 8 NICs).

[teejay]

Don't know with Hyper-V as we use VMWare, but 2 nics probably won't be enough. We have 8 in ours, which is a bit overkill but does the job nicely. I would look at adding 1 4 port of 2x 2 port nics to the servers if I were you.

[PEO]

we have 2 dual nics for each server. 1 dual for ethernet and the other dual for iSCSI. One thing I will say is make sure your nics have there own processor and not use the sysstem cpu, as we found out and caused us problems for several months, the iscsi kept dropping.

[SYNACK]

I swear I posted to this thread, yes you can use the public NIC as the heartbeat, 2003 did not allow this but 2008 does.

[steve]

We use 10 NICs on each of our cluster hosts:

4x ISCSI
4x VLAN
1x Heartbeat
1x local domain

[sacrej]

we have 4 ICSI, 3 to main network and a direct link between the servers on the last port for cluster and live migration data (SCVMM)
seems to work nicely although I might add an additional 4port card to expand main network capacity.
fyi: we are running 2 x dell R610 with dual 2.6ghz 6 core processors and 32gb ram each - connected to a md3200i for VHD and file stores and then backed up to a Dell NX3100 (12tb)