Cross-over cables and NIC teaming

[CG_2]

Should cross-over cables be useable with HP's NIC Teaming, TLB? If so, I'm having problems, what is wrong?

I can create the team, but no traffic seems to flow. I can ping over the cables without the teams, but can't with. I also tried NFT for the heck of it. I also disabled heartbeat/path validation.

I want to speed-up the cross-over connection I have between 2 systems. It is used for simple but voluminous data replication. Adding another cable would be a no-cost upgrade for me and wouldn't take any switch ports.

I'm trying to use 2 @ NC3123's in each of 2 @ DL380 G2's, latest ROMS and PSP. They are running a fresh install of Windows 2003 Ent Ed w/SP1 and latest hots. The NICs are connected Primary to Primary and Alternate to Alternate.

No OS based clustering or balancing is in use. Firewall is off. No anti-virus software.

Thanks in advance

[Tv_3]

Hi, I believe it is not supported.

[Doug de Werd · Accepted solution]

I am pretty sure this will not work. The 2 NICs have to be able to communciate with each other, and that is done by going through a switch. Without the switch, they have no way to do the heartbeat. So a switch is required.

Here's a technical paper that describes the process in more detail, although it does not specifically address teaming:

ftp://ftp.compaq.com/pub/products/servers/networking/TeamingWP.pdf

Thanks,
Doug

[CG_2]

Doug,

Heartbeats aren't my only mistake.
In reading that doc I realized the problem with what I was "planning".

With TLB, the card on the source that was sending to the "alternate" on the destination would fail since alternate NICs only care about heartbeats. So fundamentally TLB is a no-go for me. Even if I used a switch, I wouldn't succeed since TLB doesn't improve receive throughput. To achieve what I want would require a switch.

I thank both you and Tv for your replies.

[CG_2]

Forgot to close