As this is a setup in a box first we have to go into how the host is set up. The host has 2 physical nic's, one for management and one for the vm's. There are 4 vSwitches on the esx-sandbox2:

• vSwitch0 (vmnic0) - Service console and VM Network virtual machine Port Group (which on second thought I should have removed since it was not in use - but never mind).
• vSwitch1 (vmnic1) - VM Port Group for VLAN 201 for external access to the vCenter and the Service console (SC) of ESX4-1 and ESX4-2.
• vSwitch2 (no adapter) - internal vSwitch for vMotion traffic.
• vSwitch3 (no adapter) - internal vSwitch for FT traffic.

The diagram below should give you a clear explanation of the network setup of esx-sandbox2.

Each of the ESX hosts are set up in the same way

1. vSwitch0 (vmnic0) - Service Console and VM Port Group
2. vSwitch1 (vmnic1) - VMkernel for vMotion (192.168.1.x)
3. vSwitch2 (vmnic2) - VMkernel for Fault Tolerance (192.168.2.x)

Again a diagram below.

ESX4-1	ESX4-2

 

So now we have enough to build our cluster. In the short video below the steps are:

1. Create TEST_CLS_01
2. Check both boxes for HA and DRS
3. Accept all the defaults for the cluster configuration and complete the wizard
4. Drag both hosts into the cluster
5. Wait for HA configuration to finish configuration.
6. Since there is only one nic for the service console there will be an error about
   "management network redundancy", so since this is only a test environment I would like to ignore that error. Duncan Epping's HA Advanced options page gave me the das.ignoreRedundantNetWarning setting to disable this check.
7. Reconfigure for HA on both hosts, and we have a functioning cluster.

Next up in the series - shared storage and vMotion.