Network Requirements

The network requirements for clustering are:

•A unique NetBIOS cluster name

•Five unique, static IP addresses:

•two are for the network adapters on the internal network

•two are for the network adapters on the external network

•one is for the cluster itself

•A domain user account for Cluster Service (all nodes must be part of the same domain.)

•Two network adapters for each node—one for connection to the external network and the other for the node-to-node internal cluster network. If you do not use two network adapters for each node, your configuration is unsupported. HCL certification requires a separate private network adapter.

Shared Disk Requirements

Disks can be shared by the nodes. The requirements for sharing disks are as follows:

•Physically attach all shared disks, including the quorum disk, to the shared bus.

•Make sure that all disks attached to the shared bus are seen from all nodes. You can check this at the setup level in <Ctrl><M> (the BIOS configuration utility.) See page 77 for installation information.

•Assign unique SCSI identification numbers to the SCSI devices and terminate the devices properly. Refer to the storage enclosure manual about installing and terminating SCSI devices.

•Configure all shared disks as basic (not dynamic.)

•Format all partitions on the disks as NTFS.

It is best to use fault-tolerant RAID configurations for all disks. This includes RAID levels 1, 3, 5, 10, 30 or 50.

Chapter 7 Cluster Installation and Configuration

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