I get the following question often from my enterprise customers.
“Does Microsoft support clustering (of windows and sql) on top of VMWare?”
There is a “Yes-but” approach to this.
In 2007, Microsoft came out with the “Server Virtualization Validation Program” to have a standard support process for third-party (non microsoft) virtualization platforms with Microsoft products in the guest OS layer.
Microsoft supports clustering on third party virtualization in accordance with the following KB Article, which has not changed much since then:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/897615
When people bring up VMWare, the dominant virtualization platform, there are specific VMWare configurations and levels of vsphere that do matter. Consult your VMWare team for more information.
There’s a dependency on the version of VMWare, and whether you do shared-disk clustering or non-shared-disk clustering (Like AlwaysOn Availability groups).
Finally, for Clustering (Hyper-V or VMWare), some thresholds should be tuned to help increase availability.
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/clustering/2012/11/21/tuning-failover-cluster-network-thresholds/
Thanks to David Klee for help here!
George Walters 