Mixing Older Versions of Windows Server with Newer Linux Distros in the Same Cluster

Summary

When mixing older versions of Windows Server (2012 and 2012R2) with newer Linux distros (RHEL 8+ and Ubuntu 22.04+) in the same cluster, you may encouter errors similar to the below examples:

Error processing DTLS message...unsupported protocol

<node> is unable to complete negotiation with <node>

Information

These errors are the result of DTLS version support differences between the operating systems. Windows Server 2012 and 2012R2, even with the most recent updates from Microsoft, do not support any DTLS version above 1.0. Newer Linux distros, such as RedHat 8, RedHat 9 and Ubuntu 22.04 will not use anything lower than DTLS 1.2 by default.

Resolution

DxEnterprise can enable all nodes to fall-back to DTLS version 1.0, which then allows inter-cluster node negotiations to complete when older versions of Windows Server are joined to the cluster.

To enable DTLS 1.0 across the cluster, use the dxcli set-globalsetting command:

dxcli set-globalsetting "dtls.options" "minproto=dtls1.0"