Good morning, everyone:
I am studying for the 74-409 that MS has given away the free exam vouchers for and am trying to set up a small, budget study lab to get hands-on with the Hyper-V Server 2012 Core (the one that is just the hyper-v, aka the free one).
While looking through the jumpstart videos, I noticed that the NIC considerations for the Hyper-V servers call for multiple NICs, like so:
Unfortunately, I have a very limited number of PCI slots to work with (2 for each board) and my place of work cannot justify buying a few USB-to-NIC devices to make up the difference.
So, being new to the whole clustering, hyper-v scene, I am wondering how few NICs can I get this down to. For example, do I really need 2 NICs for shared storage? Is it only for the teaming bandwidth and redundancy, or is there an unavoidable reason for it? Can I limit my lab project to one type of activity so that I could use a NIC for a hands-on failover-clustering-only tutorial and then later use the same NIC for a hands-on live-migration-only tutorial? Obviously the NIC for the VM network needs to be there, but for this small lab do I really need a management NIC, or can I squeeze by without one for now?
Your ideas and suggestions are appreciated.