Private IP address for cluster heartbeat on physical Windows Nodes

[dbutcher1]

Hi everyone,

I am installing a Windows 2016 failover cluster to bare metal on several M5 and M3 blades.  I have created several vnic teamplates, one for management, and one for cluster heartbeat.  I will use the management vNic to connect to the host, but the cluster heartbeat would only be used to communicate across the nodes in the cluster.  For this reason I would prefer to use private, non-routeable IPs and not configure a gateway, such as:

192.168.1.x

255.255.255.0

I'm trying to wrap my head around how to do this and if this is even possible, because I would imagine even if I tag the vNics with the same VLAN the traffic is going to get dropped when it hits the switches.  I would imagine this must be a fairly common goal when using Windows Failover Clusters, is there any guidance for configuring cluster heartbeat on bare metal?

Thanks.

[Wes Austin]

This guide is for SQL Server 2012, but I think outlines at lot of the info you are looking for.

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/data-center-virtualization/unified-computing/guide_C07-715950.html