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

[Nader-Hussein]

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

[Gordon026]

Thanks for the information 

[jmora]

The answer:

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