But how about production environments when the blades have only 4 Physical NIC's?
Option 1. If your vendor does support NPAR technology (Broadcom, QLogic), you will be able to create up to 4 "Virtual Logical NIC's" per physical NIC ( VLAN/QoS ). Although this solution is not supported by Microsoft, it's the best solution in terms of performance and it is supported by the vendors. This solution will provide you 100% HA as you can have up to 16 Logical NIC's.
Option 2. Supported by Microsoft. Allocate 2(two) NIC's for the iSCSI using MPIO and then :
Note that the QoS configuration is based on "per port" and Windows only allows you to specify caps – not reserves. This solution, although supported by Microsoft, does not give you 100% HA.
By default, all internal cluster network have a metric value starting at 1000 and incrementing by 100. The first internal network which the cluster sees when it first comes online has a metric of 1000, the second has a metric of 1100, etc.
When you create CSV's, the failover cluster automatically chooses the network that appears to be the best for CSV communication. The lowest Metric value designates the network for Cluster and CSV traffic. The second lowest value designates the network for live migration. Additional networks with a metric below 10000 will be used as backup networks if the “Cluster & CSV Traffic” or “Live Migration Traffic” networks fail. The lowest network with a value of at least 10000 will be used for “Public Traffic”. Consider giving the highest possible values to the networks which you do not want any cluster or public traffic to go through, such as for “ISCSI Traffic”, so that they are never used, or only used when no other networks at all are available.
To view the networks, their metric values, and if they were automatically or manually configured, run the clustering PowerShell cmdlet: PS > Get-ClusterNetwork | ft Name, Metric, AutoMetric
To change the value of a network metric, run: PS >Get-ClusterNetwork "Live Migration" ).Metric =800
If you want the cluster to start automatically assigning the Metric setting again for the network named "Live Migration": PS > Get-ClusterNetwork "Live Migration" ).AutoMetric = $true
How to override Network Prioritization Behavior?
Option 1. Change the network’s properties. If you select “Do not allow cluster network communication on this network”, then it will not be possible to send any “Cluster & CSV Traffic” or “Live Migration Traffic” through this network, even if the network has the lowest metric values. The cluster will honor this override and find the network with the next lowest value to send this type of traffic :
Option 2 (exclusively for “Live Migration Traffic”) :
Note : You don't need to perform this action as per VM basis. When you configure a network for live migration for a specific virtual machine, the setting is global and therefore applies to all virtual machines.
Some other interesting articles:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd446679(WS.10).aspx
http://www.hyper-v.nu/archives/hvredevoort/2011/03/windows-server-2008-r2-sp1-and-hp-network-teaming-testing-results/
http://blogs.technet.com/b/vishwa/archive/2011/02/01/tuning-scvmm-for-vdi-deployments.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/clustering/archive/2011/06/17/10176338.aspx
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd446679.aspx
FZB edited Revision 3. Comment: formating
FZB edited Revision 2. Comment: formating
FZB edited Revision 1. Comment: typo
FZB edited Original. Comment: formating
How to find the equivalent Hyper-V 2012 article?