Microsoft Failover Cluster node not sending out Gratuitous ARP requests after a failover

Nader-Hussein — Sat, 05 Dec 2020 18:21:26 GMT

This was a particularly odd issue which I had never experienced before so I thought it’s worth blogging about it.

During a normal MS Failover Cluster failover operation, the node calming the cluster roles sends out a GARP request to notify the networking infrastructure of the MAC address change. The Layer 3 switch / router then updates the MAC address in the ARP table and packets are routed to the node which claimed the cluster roles. Recently I found myself troubleshooting a MS Failover cluster deployment which wasn’t behaving quite in this manner.

Some background info:

For the sake of this blog post lets call the 2 nodes A and B.
The nodes are running Server 2016, SQL 2012 and Microsoft Failover Cluster services.
Each node has 2 NICs, one for the client and management network, and one for the heartbeat network.
The cluster consists of 3 Network resource; a cluster IP address and 2 SQL instance addresses which float between the 2 nodes depending on which one is active.
All 3 IP addresses are in the same VLAN.
Running continues ping to all 3 IP addresses during failover tests.

So when the active node was A and I failed over the cluster roles to node B, the failover process was completing successfully however the 3 cluster IP addresses would stop pinging and wouldn’t start pinging again until an hour or so… if I reverted back to node A instantly, the pinging would start again.

Looking at the ARP table on the Layer 3 switch I realized that the MAC address associated with the cluster IP addresses wasn’t changing to the MAC address of node B – which is what we would expect as a result of the failover operation.

How to To enable “GARP reply” on Palo Alto

Re: Microsoft Failover Cluster node not sending out Gratuitous ARP requests after a failover

Gordon026 — Mon, 07 Dec 2020 09:02:00 GMT

Thanks for the information

Re: Microsoft Failover Cluster node not sending out Gratuitous ARP requests after a failover

jmora — Wed, 19 May 2021 16:51:14 GMT

The answer:

https://knowledgebase.paloaltonetworks.com/KCSArticleDetail?id=kA10g000000ClrfCAC

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Microsoft Failover Cluster node not sending out Gratuitous ARP requests after a failover

Re: Microsoft Failover Cluster node not sending out Gratuitous ARP requests after a failover

Re: Microsoft Failover Cluster node not sending out Gratuitous ARP requests after a failover