ILO NICs blasting multicast traffic

[mk-ultra]

Has anyone ever experienced ILO NICs saturating their connection with outbound multicast traffic?

Unfortunately, it's going to take a couple of days before I'm in a position to span the switch ports and actually capture some traffic to see what it looks like, but here are the details thus far:

3 Proliant DL380 G7s, all with their ILO NICs on a VLAN dedicated to ILO only.  These ILO ports are the only 3 ports enabled on the ILO VLAN at the moment.

Server BIOS and ILO details:

BIOS P67 9/30/2010

ILO3 FW 1.15 (28 Oct 2010)

Switch is a Cisco 2248 (FEX)... brains are Cisco 5020 vPC peers running NX-OS 4.2(1)N1(1)

Switch port config (similar for all 3 server's ILO ports).  VLAN 209 is reserved for ILO:

interface Ethernet122/1/10
  description transcoder1_ilo
  no cdp enable
  switchport access vlan 209
  spanning-tree port type edge

Connection auto-negotiated to 100/full:

Eth122/1/10    transcoder1_ilo    up       209       full    100     --

Port stats show the port is completely hosed by outbound traffic from ILO NIC (~94Mbs):

30 seconds output rate 93335616 bits/sec, 8019 packets/sec

and it's exclusively multicast traffic:

TX
    0 unicast packets  9423653 multicast packets  0 broadcast packets
    9423653 output packets  13690405417 bytes

I've shut down all of the ILO ports on the VLAN, then brought them back up one at a time to see if this was storm-like behavior (leaving only one ILO port enabled in turn).  No difference.  Lone ILO NICs continue to barf multicast as fast as they can as soon as their port comes up.

[Johan Guldmyr]

Hello, I haven't seen this before.

Maybe it could have something to do with the IP settings on the ilo interface?

As far as I could interpret the revisions for ILO FW 1.16 and 1.20 there aren't any mentioning of this:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodTypeId=15351&prodSeriesId=4091412&swItem=MTX-54ee83e1f58f4d348e854342fd&prodNameId=4091432&swEnvOID=1005&swLang=8&taskId=135&mode=5

There were some fixes in the BIOS 2011.01.30 but nothing that mentions this kind of problem.

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodTypeId=15351&prodSeriesId=4091412&swItem=MTX-6f110902f85648beacca7ffb2f&prodNameId=4091432&swEnvOID=1005&swLang=8&taskId=135&mode=5

[Starkad]

Hello

Yes have also seen this, have you found any solution ?

NB! A workarond that worked for us (have only tested on 1 server) was that after disabled wol - power off - power on - enabled wol again in the bios we havent seen the problem since, i.e. even with wol enabled and power off/on several times we dont see the multicast traffic when server is "off". 

[Starkad]

NBB ! Forgot the say that the server we tested is a 580. 

[Oscar A. Perez]

Guys, can I get a network trace showing the multicast traffic coming from iLO3?

[SFHR]

Hi,

Did you try reseting ILO?

Regards,