ProLiant Servers (ML,DL,SL)
1748268 Members
3569 Online
108760 Solutions
New Discussion

DL 380 Gen8 with Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V Role NICS change

 
MJIT
Occasional Advisor

DL 380 Gen8 with Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V Role NICS change

Hello there,

 

we have a DL 380 Gen 8 Server installed via provisioning. ILO and 1 NIC is connected.

When we open the network center we see 4 NICs with naming 1 -4. NIC has static IP.

As soon as we install the Hyper-v role and restart the server, we get NIC 5 -8. Also, static IP is gone and DHCP is enabled on all NICS, plus the 4 "old" Nics show up as disabled in device manager.

 

Any ideas?

Regards, Marcus

3 REPLIES 3
Neal Howard
Advisor

Re: DL 380 Gen8 with Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V Role NICS change

In the past whenever I've encountered mystery NICs appearing and formerly established NICs getting hidden or disabled  in Windows machines, I've usually ended up just deleting all  the NICs under device manager (make sure to enable the "Show Hidden Devices" option) and then run the Scan for Hardware Changes to rediscover the NICs that are actually installed and redo their configs. Make sure you've got local copies of any device drivers needed by your NICs since you'll temporarily be severed from your network  during the procedure.

 

I've never encountered the NICs getting out of whack simply by enabling the Hyper-V role on Windows 2012 on a  DL380 Gen8 machine though... and I'm running  4 of these machines as Hyper-V hosts... with the only difference is that I'm running Windows 2012 original edition, not R2.

waaronb
Respected Contributor

Re: DL 380 Gen8 with Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V Role NICS change

When you installed Hyper-V, did you create multiple virtual switches for each of the physical NICs or anything like that?  Check your Hyper-V and look for that to see if what you have now is the 4 physical NICs that are bound to Hyper-V, and then you also see 4 vswitches or something like that.

 

That is NOT something that happens automatically by the way, so if you do see something like that, it means it was done manually by whomever added that role, or perhaps if a script was used to add the role, it "helpfully" did that for you.

 

You could also check the load balancing in Server 2012 and see if some teams were setup.

 

It actually should be pretty simple to just look at these NICs you have and identify what kind of device it is (the hardware it detected).  That will point you in the right direction.

 

In the unusual case that they are "copies" of the 4 hardware NICs on the box, then yes, that is not supposed to happen, and I've never seen that on my servers with Hyper-V (G6 through Gen8, Server 2008 through Server 2012 R2).  None of them have made duplicate hardware NICs show up at all, whether by adding the Hyper-V role or anything else.

MJIT
Occasional Advisor

Re: DL 380 Gen8 with Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V Role NICS change

Hi there,

 

the reason for that behaviour is that SR-IOV was enabled in BIOS. As soon as you disable it, this does not happen again.

Leaving SR-IOV enabled will always bring up this "error" when you enable the Hyper-v role.

 

Thanks to Marc Grote for solving this.

 

Marcus