HP NIC Teaming

Windows 2008 Server with HyperV and NIC Teaming Part 3

As we get ready to roll this out live I rebuilt the Host servers and had no trouble with Blade1 and the networking and the switches probably because a was there when I did this. So OK I got Blade1 going and the Virtual Servers redid and ready for the live prime time. No biggie I will just redo Blade2 and set things up like the other one. Things was going fine until I got to the point of getting the SAN NICs in the Vlan and trunked. Things was fine but I didn’t realize one little detail. When you trunk your NIC’s in the switch that is what you see the trunk name not the Ports. I fought this and fought this not realizing what was going on and finally had to have Jason come back just to tell me oh yea you got to Pick the Trunk name and add that to the Vlan. Duh!!! Ok see previous post and the line about “KISS” Keep it Simple Stupid.

Til later just Roger

Windows 2008 Server with HyperV and NIC Teaming Part 2

This one has been definitely a adventure in getting up and running. In Part 1 of this I talked about what we had to do with the Teaming with HyperV. Well that wasn’t the end of the adventure as I thought. I had tested the VS Servers by pinging the IP’s which I would get a response from. I also tested browsing the network and Internet access all looked well. What happened though when I added a static IP to the NICs of the VS Servers was I could still ping the world but not go anywhere. I thought OK they work when DHCP handles the addressing so what I did was on the LAN NIC of the IIS Servers I set a reservation for the NIC and assigned the IP that way on the LAN NIC that we wanted and this worked. I could do what I needed to on the network and such so now what to do on the NLB NIC.

I started by googling the NLB setup of a Virtual Server and I came up with MS KB Article 953828. There was a hotfix for the 2008 Servers that would be doing this but nothing for 2003 Server. On this they talked of steps to do after the hotfix so I thought why not give this a shot. So I staticaly set the IP on the NLB NIC and then used the NLB Manager on Blade1 to configured the Load Balancing on the first IIS Server. Once this was done I shut down the IIS Server and on the NIC defined for the NLB in HyperV manager I added the MAC Address of the NLB Cluster IP started the VS Server up and it was working. I am assuming it has something to do with the switching of the Team and also the HyperV Switch and the MAC address of the involved NIC’s in the whole process. That is something to be figured out yet on why I seen this behavior but in the mean time I have things working the way they need to be working.

Til later just Roger

Windows 2008 Server with HyperV and NIC Teaming

I have a client who wanted his server to be fail-over safe from NIC’s to switches to his HP iSCSI MSA 2012i. We used the HP NIC teaming for the SAN NIC’s and for the HyperV NIC Teaming our first sets of tests went fine and then we started having a problem with the HyperV Servers losing connection to the network. I dug into this and found that this is a known issue with HP NIC Teaming and HyperV. Now what am I going to do to make this work properly? I dug on the web for a while and I found a post on the web from a MS test Engineer. On it he explained how to use the Broadcom Nic Management Suite to use the teaming feature from that and then create your HyperV Networking. Ok I thought what do you ahve to lose here so I set it up. I let the HP Network Management do the SANTeaming and then used the BACS 11.6.10 version do the teaming of the HyperV NIC’s. I got this setup and the Virtual Servers running and started my testing and this worked. No loss of pings or anything here. Looking better so now for the true test if I lose a NOC will they keep working so I unplugged one of the NIC’s and the HyperV Servers keep running like nothing happened. I am now on hour 16 of the test and the VSs are still going no problems.

Til Later just Roger

HP Servers and Windows Updates

There are days you just wish you had not got up early. Wednesday morning I had a site that needed updated with Windows updates so I was around about 2:30 and started updating all the servers. This was the only time of day we could do this so I got them all done by 5:30 or so and I checked OWA and the TS Gateway and the different programs and it all looked good. So I thought anyway about 8 we got the call that users could not access their email or user files. I popped in and looked around and it looked good from the server perspective anyways.

So they sent someone on-site and they couldn’t find anything so they started a Server down call with MS and worked on this much of the day and into the night. I got a email from the tech on-site about 9 wondering if I could relieve him at midnight if nothing had changed. I checked and nothing had changed so I headed on-site and got their a little after midnight and the MS guy was dwelling on the networking of the server and I watched for while and I could see one of the NICs was showing as failed which when I looked more it was actually the Network Team that was broken. We got the HP updates and updated the server with the latest and greatest updates and then rebooted the server still no go so I suggested removing the team which the MS guy thought would be a good deal. We removed this and then set the right IP on one of the adapters and disabled the other rebooted the server and life was good. We got the virtual servers back online and everything working. Moral to the story is make sure you ahve your HP Server updated with the newest updates as some of the MS Updates are not compatible with older drivers and firmware and such.

Til later just Roger