NIC Teaming with SPP2012.06.0(B) Win2008 R2

[chuckk281]

Dave had a customer question:

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My customer is upgrading his BL685c G7 servers running Windows 2008 R2 and Hyper-V with SPP 2012.06.0(B).

He is finding that after the firmware and driver upgrades his Teaming configuration is broken.

HP support are suggesting this is to be expected and that you have to remove the teaming before applying the updates and then re-configuring the teaming afterwards. This doesn’t seem right to me, plus I can’t find any mention of this in SPP release notes or any customer advisories.

Has anyone else experienced this?

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Input from Chad:

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With Hyper-V hosts, we have seen this behavior from time to time though not consistently. The approach with a Hyper-V host that has seemed to work is this:

-          Set the Virtual Switches using the teamed NICs in Hyper-V to Private away from External

-          Do not allow the NCU package to run as part of the SPP installation

-          Update the NCU after the SPP completes – run the NCU update after the initial SPP reboot (if a reboot was needed)

-          Set Virtual Switches back to External

From a pure Windows perspective, we’ve seen the teaming issue crop up every now and again when running the NCU update with the SPP. I’m not sure if it is a timing issue but running the NCU separately seems to be the best course of action.

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Other comments or suggestions?