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Nodes being removed from failover cluster membership on VMware ESX

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This article addresses the issue of finding nodes removed from active failover cluster membership when the nodes are hosted on VMware ESX.

Symptom

You see the following event in the System Event Log of the Event Viewer when this issue occurs:

Screenshot of the details of Event 1135 in Event Viewer.

Resolution

One specific problem is with the VMXNET3 adapters dropping inbound network packets because the inbound buffer is set too low to handle large amounts of traffic. You easily can find out if packets are being drop by using Performance Monitor to look at the Network Interface\Packets Received Discarded counter.

Screenshot of the Add Counters window in Performance Monitor showing the Packets Received Discarded counter.

After you've added this counter, look at the Average, Minimum, and Maximum numbers. If the values are higher than zero, then the receive buffer needs to be adjusted upward for the adapter. This problem is documented in Large packet loss in the guest OS using VMXNET3 in ESXi (2039495).