Last week I was pretty much focusing on setting a lab environment to test SQL 2012 Availability Groups and Failover Cluster Instances.

I had to setup 3 VM’s to play around and out of that one will be a domain controller.

Once all the VM’s were ready and started communicating each other within the domain,I decided to setup the cluster.

The very first process involved in setting up a cluster is to validate the configuration.I went ahead with the validation part.

I was running all these VM’s within my laptop and had no option for a shared storage and I was pretty sure that I can just ignore all the warning which I am going to get for the disks within the cluster validation.

The validation was completed and it came up with 1 expected warning and one additional warning for me.

The additional warning was related to Network

It was simply telling me that I am running on one network card and there is no redundant one available to handle crisis situation.This is a single point of failure.

This is just a warning and will allow you to proceed with setting up the cluster,however its giving you a very important message.

For LAB situations this is normal,however for production deployments you might have to have redundant ones.

                     [Picture courtesy http://support.microsoft.com/kb/813937 ]

Conclusion

Its pretty fine to ignore these warnings when you are doing a LAB setup,however you should be very careful when dealing with highly critical production environments.