Windows 2012 Cluster Connectivity issues

[Vikas]

Hi,
I have been building a test env. for Windows 2012 Failover Cluster with 3 nodes and 1 domain controller. Everything has been going fine until I went on to verifying cluster. Node1 from where I was verifying cluster was not able to communicate with Node2. When I checked by pinging it was resolving FQDN to IP but not able to communicate and gave error "Destination host unreachable". Strange thing is that issue exists between Node 1 and Node 2 only, rest they all are able to communicate among them and with DC perfectly. I have used bridged networking for connecting them.

It doesn't seem to be a OS issue to me and next thing which can be is virtualbox, can someone please help me to figure out what can be wrong here. I have put lot of effort in building this and doesn't it to get wasted.

Thanks,
Vikas Sharma

[Vikas]

Just found out the problem and solution , as I cloned all the nodes it has assigned same mac addresses to node1 and node2. Though I had run sysprep after that, but seems mac addresses of both these machines remained intact. If you are facing same kind of issue just run arp -a on both machines and match mac's of both.

Solution is:
1. Shut down any one of the nodes.
2. Go to Network settings and click on Advance settings under Adapter tab.
3.Go to Left hand green link beside MAC address box, click on it and you will get completely new MAC address.
4. After you power VM back, it should most probably bring smile to your face .

Thanks,
Vikas Sharma

[noteirak]

The actual proper way of doing this is to make VirtualBox generate new MAC addresses during the import. There is an option exactly for that. If you create new VMs, you wouldn't have this issue.