6.5.1

Table Of Contents
Other Requirements and Recommendations
The following table lists the components in your environment that have requirements for options or seings.
Table 62. Other Clustering Requirements and Recommendations
Component Requirement
Disk If you place the boot disk on a virtual disk, select Thick Provision during disk provisioning.
The only disks that you should not create with the Thick Provision option are RDM les (both
physical and virtual compatibility mode).
Windows Use:
n
Windows Server 2003 SP1 (32 bit/64 bit)
n
Windows Server 2003 SP2 (32 bit/64 bit)
n
Windows Server 2003 R2 (32 bit/64 bit)
n
Windows Server 2003 R2 SP1 (32 bit/64 bit)
n
Windows Server 2003 R2 SP2 (32 bit/64 bit)
n
Windows Server 2008 SP1 (32 bit/64 bit)
n
Windows Server 2008 SP2 (32 bit/64 bit)
n
Windows Server 2008 R2 (64 bit)
n
Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 (32 bit/64 bit)
n
Windows Server 2012
n
Windows Server 2012 R2
For Windows Server 2003 SP1 and SP2, use only two cluster nodes.
For Windows Server 2008 SP2 and above, you can use up to ve cluster nodes.
Disk I/O timeout is 60 seconds or more
(HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Disk\TimeOutValue).
N If you recreate the cluster, this value might be reset to its default, so you must change it
again.
The cluster service must restart automatically on failure (rst, second, and subsequent times).
ESXi conguration Do not overcommit memory. Set the Memory Reservation (minimum memory) option to the same
as the amount of memory assigned to the virtual machine.
If you must overcommit memory, the swap le must be local, not on the SAN.
ESXi 5.0 uses a dierent technique to determine if Raw Device Mapped (RDM) LUNs are used for
MSCS cluster devices, by introducing a conguration ag to mark each device as "perennially
reserved" that is participating in an MSCS cluster. For ESXi hosts hosting passive MSCS nodes with
RDM LUNs, use the esxcli command to mark the device as perennially reserved:
esxcli storage core device setconfig -d <naa.id> --perennially-reserved=true. See
KB 1016106 for more information.
Multipathing Contact your multipathing software vendor for information and support of non-VMware
multipathing software in vSphere.
Required Information for Technical Support
The following table lists the les and seings to collect if you require technical support. Technical support
uses these les and seings to analyze clustering issues.
N Verify that your setup complies with the checklists in Table 6-1 and Table 6-2 before you contact
technical support.
Setup for Failover Clustering and Microsoft Cluster Service
36 VMware, Inc.