• Do you have a firewall between your pc and the cluster? If so, it's an old and well known issue.

    SQL Browser is not cluster-aware. This means that it can receive request on UDP port 1434 on the virtual IP assigned to the cluster resource, but it can decide to send back the response from the physical IP address of the cluster node.

    The firewall allows packets when it detects a datagram in response to a request, but it drops packets that are originated outside a "conversation". When SQLBrowser responds using the physical node IP address, the packet is not considered in response to the original UDP datagram, so it gets dropped.

    To avoid the issue, add a rule to the firewall to allow UDP packets having the cluster node IP address as source and "ANY" as destination, port 1434.

    Hope this helps

    Gianluca

    -- Gianluca Sartori