DL580G2 with two NC6136 fibre gigabit NICs

[Stuart Robinson]

We are encountering issues with a new DL580G2 which we are trying to connect to our gigabit fibre backbone.

We have two NC6136 NICs teamed, SmartSwitch fault tolerance, if the fibre cables are connected the server fails to boot and constantly restarts itself. If we remove the cables it starts everytime.

The cards are in slots 1&2 (IRQ7), in slots 3 & 4 we have two Emulex LP9000 HBAs, in slot 5 we have an NC3134 NIC for our backup network and current front network interface and in slot 6 we have a SA5304.

Any ideas?

[Juan Manuel López]

How did you resolve this problem, Stuart ?
I have the the same problem.
Juanma.

[Daniel Kobus_1]

We had the same issue so I will break down what we did to fix it;

First - if this is a redundant configuration you just broke the main rule - 2 of the same cards on the same bus (not redundant)

Second - To verify functionality remove the HBA's and NC3134.

Third - From what I have been told by HP the DL580's boot the PCI slots in the following order 6,5,4,3,2,1 so you may want to change the order of the cards.

We have the same configuration minus the NC3134 and we use the FCA2355 (note - there are some issues with the DL580 and the FCA2355)

We installed them in the following order;

6 & 5 Blank

4 - FCA2355 - 1
3 - Fibre NIC - 1
2 - FCA2355 - 2
1 - Fibre NIC - 2

Hope this works for you!

Forth -

[Daniel Kobus_1]

Corrected information on the PCI-X bus on a DL580

The DL580G2 has 3 separate shared PCI-X buses. They are buses 2, 3 and 4. Slots 1 & 2 are shared on bus 4. Slots 3 & 4 on shared on bus 3 and slots 5 & 6 are shared on bus 2. Correct (for a balanced bus) slot population order requires that you populate one slot in each bus 1st before filling up any individual bus. You should use the following order to maximize performance and cooling:

Slot 6 1st
Slot 5 4th
Slot 4 2nd
Slot 3 5th
Slot 2 3rd
Slot 1 6th