Microsoft Cluster in UCS

[russ.givens]

Anybody know of any good documentation on how to setup a MCSC between two Blades in a UCS chassis?                

[e.nieuwstad]

Why would it be any different than setting it up on a regular rackserver environment. The only thing which might be a problem is when the clusters use multicasting between each other. There are some topic here which describe some problems with multicast without an IGMP querier in that particular vlan.

[HAROLD MEIER]

The multicast issue is really only applicable to NLB, not a MCSC. 

From MS Failover Clustering in Windows Server 2008 R2:
Multicast functionality has been discontinued in Windows Server 2008 failover clustering, and cluster communications now use User Datagram Protocol (UDP) unicast. (Port 3343 is still the common port that is used by Microsoft failover clusters.) There are now new messaging processes that are internal to the Cluster service itself. When nodes transmit and receive heartbeats to confirm that each node is still available, the nodes use Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) rather than the less reliable UDP.

In my experience classic shared storage failover clusters have been just like rackmount servers. I setup a separate vNIC and VLAN for the heartbeat cluster private network, but that's about all I did that was UCS specific.

[Robert Burns]

Russ,

There is some addtional info in this thread: https://supportforums.cisco.com/thread/2013429

When UCS is in End Host Mode it will always discard unknown unicast.  For clustering you'll nee to use multicast mode.  Your clustering server must be configured in Multicast Mode (IGMP) + static ARP entry on gateway. With multicast mode, you'll may also need to add static MAC entries upstream switch.

You can also use a Multicast router or IGMP querier which will constantly poll the hosts with multicast queries that can  trigger multicast reports, which in turn populate igmp snooping table on  UCS and upstream switches.

There is improvements to Multicast Support (IGMP Querier) coming in the next major release -  v2.1

Regards,

Robert