Windows 2008 Server

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

Server 2008 HyperV, HP BL 480c and failover with a MSA 2012i

I know I have been talking about the project I have going on at one customer site. We got a HP c7000 and in this we have 2 BL 480c Blades with dual QC CPU’s 48 Gig RAM, 4 NICs and 4 146–HDs and we also have a HP MSA 2012i iSCSI SAN device with 12 450 Gig 10k SAS Drives in it and we had 2 GBE2c switches in the c7000 for the interconnects.

One of the goals from the customer was to have complete failover for the networking as we will be running Virtual Servers on the 2008 Servers on the host machines the BL 480c’s. So with help from Jason one of our network guys and fellow blogger on this site we got the failover working. I have to admit I am not the greatest with networking so his help was much appreciated on this project. He has been in the process at this site of moving in a new core network switching using the HP Blade Switches is what I will call them but I think they are PROCURVE 5400ZL Switches.

How we ended up doing it was pretty simple as we took the GBE2 switches out and put HP passthrough modules in the c7000. When we would down one of the GBE2c switches the failover would not work as Jason thought the response of the switches was not fast enough. But we used HP Teaming on 2 of the NICs for the HyperV networking and we teamed the other 2 NICs for the SAN networking that would be handling the iSCSI traffic to the MSA. We had spread the MSA connections and the team connections across multiple switches on the HP Switch Blade. We had 2 Virtual Servers running on each Blade Server and when I downed the MSA Array Controller the servers keep working as the other Array picked the failed Array of the MSA on the fly and then Jason pulled a switch and everything just keep working because of the NIC Teaming. I know this in not detailed a lot but it was all pretty simple actually and not that complicated once you get to the end result. But it is working.

Til later just Roger