The physical NICs dedicated to the back-end network must be connected to two physical switches on an isolated network. On all KVM hosts, pNIC-1 must connect to the same physical switch (switch1), and pNIC-2 on all KVM hosts must connect to the same second physical switch (switch2). The physical switches must be cabled for an inter-switch connection. To guarantee data security and HCP reliability, back-end switches must be configured with spanning tree disabled and multicast traffic enabled. The back-end switches must be at least 1 GbE and must be dedicated to HCP.
To support HCP VM inter-node communication, the back-end network must have multicast enabled. In most cases, enabling multicast on the switch is not sufficient to allow for multicast traffic. Most switches need additional configuration parameters. To allow multicast traffic between the HCP VM nodes, follow the switch-vendor documentation to configure the network.
If the HCP VM back-end network is on a public network, the HCP VM system should reside on its own VLAN.