DL560 and gigabit speeds

[Steve Giordano]

I'm wanting to use gigabit speeds on the on board nic's on a DL560. We had the NOC set the switch port to 1000/Full and I set the NIC to the same but no connection. I set the NIC to Auto/Auto and it connected. When configured to 100/Full at the switch and 100/Full at the NIC everything works as expected. Anyone aware of issues with the gigabit speed on these nics and this setting? I've applied the full 7.10 support pack as well and still get the same issue. Thanks.

[Colin_29]

I don't know of any issues, but if your switch is set to 1000/Full and the NIC is set to Auto/Auto, then it must be communicating at 1000/Full. I can't see any problem leaving it in that configuration.

[Steve Giordano]

I'm just concerned because there are problems when the switch is set to 100/Full and the NIC is Auto. Both sides have to be configured the same or else we've seen lots of dropped packets and poor performance.

[Colin_29]

Are you able to rule out the switch by connecting another device to it that is set to 1000/Full and snif for dropped packets?

If that works then there must be an issue with the NIC in your DL560.

[Steve Giordano]

If we change the port back to 100/Full and set the NIC to the same it works fine. I only have this problem when the switch is set to 1000/Full. The NIC's are teamed so I think we'll "unteam" them and check each NIC seperately and see if it's a problem with one particular NIC. So what I'm understanding then is I should be able to use the 1000/Full setting and we may have an issue with our NIC on this server. THanks.

[Colin_29]

You forgot to mention that you were teaming the NICs.

In answer to your last question: Yes it should work. HP say "The ProLiant DL560 ships standard with two NC7781 10/100/1000 Port NICs. The NC7781 is an auto sensing 10/100/1000 Mbps (megabits per second) network interface controller, and should toggle between standard Ethernet (10Mbps), Fast Ethernet (100Mbps), or Gigabit Ethernet (1000Mbps) depending on the speed of the network infrastructure that supports it. While these speeds are theoretical maximums other elements such the server's configuration, applications, and the total networking infrastructure at the customer location suggest that real world performance will be somewhat less."

I now think that your problem is either with the way you have set up the teaming or the way that the switch ports are set up, or a combination of both.

Do you have two switch ports bound together? Are you running the team as load balanced or fail over?

I think it would be a good idea to test each NIC in a non-teamed mode.

[Steve Giordano]

Yes they are teamed but the problem was noticed in the build of the server before the team was setup. Each NIC is connected to a seperate phsyical switch. We're not doing any port channeling on the switch (or any other switch configuration) and the teaming configuration is fail on fault. We can't load balance unless we channel the ports on the switch. I'll talk to the NOC a little more but as far as I know the ports are "hardcoded" to 1000/Full. This is a standard that's been adopted since there were always mismatches on the switches and servers between 100/Full and Auto and caused a lot of performance problems. We see better performance when both sides are configured for 100/Full -- even better than configuring both sides to Auto. Seems like the overhead of negotiation causes perf issues (just a guess).