1. We are on 5.5, planning to move to 6.5 in the next couple weeks. (Yes, I know, Microsoft Failover clusters in 5.5 are harder than doing them in 6.5. ) My boss wants to do it now.. I'm trying to only do this on test VMs, as an exercise to learn how to do it later to set up new, replacement production clusters, but I'm just an employee, what do I know?
2. Since the OS of the guests will be Win 2012 R2, and clustering on that OS can use a File Share Witness on a completely separate host, that's the way I want to go. (also, we're already doing that for our physical clusters).
If I try and set up my new cluster with this method, I should be able to dispense with the private NIC (and accompanying vswitch config), correct? All it needs is regular network connectivity to the file share, in the same way using a private heartbeat NIC just requires that sort of network connectivity.
Thanks