Internal communication between clustered nodes uses the virtual Ethernet as the private network (or interconnect) that carries the heartbeat. The cluster service on each node uses a heartbeat to keep track of the current state of the nodes within the cluster. The cluster service uses the heartbeat to: (1) Determine when a failover to another node should occur, (2) Synchronize the cluster databases on each node, (3) Verify node failures during a cluster configuration change. The private network uses the single network virtual Ethernet model.