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Two NIC with same address IP

 
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Two NIC with same address IP

Hello,

We have an Alpha ES40 with a NC3131 Fast Ethernet Card (Dual and 10/100), and OpenVMS 7.3-2.

We are only using one NIC on a TCP/IP LAN.

Can we use the two NIC's with the same address IP? If it were WinNT or Win2000 we would use Teaming option, but in OpenVMS we don't know how we can to do it.

Thank you,

Llu├н
7 REPLIES 7

Re: Two NIC with same address IP

Hello again,

message before I forgot to comment that I've been looking for possible solutions on docs and Internet, but the only one that I have found is the failSAFE option, but in this option I've understood the two NIC's are not working at the same time. We would like two NIC's working at the same time to win bandwidth too (aside redundancy).

Thank you,

Llu├Г
Volker Halle
Honored Contributor

Re: Two NIC with same address IP

Llui,

on OpenVMS V7.3-2 and TCPIP V5.4, you have 2 different options on using multiple NICs to run IP:

1.) LAN Failover

This is an OpenVMS feature, where you can bundle multiple NICs and present them as one LAN device to the OpenVMS system (and the various network protocols: IP, DECnet, LAT, SCS etc.).

Only ONE of the physical NICs will be active at any time, but you will get aditional redundancy: if one of the NICs, cables, connected switches/ports fails, the other NIC will transparently continue with the LAN data transfer.

You configure this feature using MC LANCP.


2.) failSAFE IP

You can configure multiple NICs to provide the same IP address. Only one NIC will be active using this address, but the failSAFE IP service will activate the address on the alternate NIC, if the first one fails (received packet counts stops incrementing). This is an IP-only feature and does not include the other network protocols (e.g. DECnet, SCS, LAT)

You configure this feature using @TCPIP$CONFIG.COM.

Volker.
Volker Halle
Honored Contributor

Re: Two NIC with same address IP

Llui,

to use both NICs at the same time, you could configure failSAFE IP with different IP addresses on both interfaces and configure the 'other' interface as the failSAFE interface for each of them.

Then you could use DNS round-robin load balancing for those 2 IP addresses.

Volker.

Re: Two NIC with same address IP

Volker,

thank you for your answer, we'll test the configuration you has given me about failSAFE+DNS.

On the other hand, do you know if there is some external application or product that makes this function?

Thank you,

Llu├Г┬н
Volker Halle
Honored Contributor
Solution

Re: Two NIC with same address IP

Llui,

both features have been made available on OpenVMS 'quite recently'. You would need to check other IP stacks, whether they provide a similar feature.

If both NICs have IP addresses in the same subnet, TCP/IP will provide load-balancing of outgoing connections, see

http://h71000.www7.hp.com/wizard/wiz_6406.html

Volker.

Re: Two NIC with same address IP

Volker,

I think it will serve to us. I didn't know about outgoing balancing of the failSAFE option.

Thank you very much,

Lluis.

Re: Two NIC with same address IP

I amb closing this thread because I think the failSAFE option is the solution to our problem. So, I'll test it and if it is all ok I'll implement it soon.

Thank you,

Lluis.