Servers with 4 NIC's Teamed cannot ping Jet Direct Devices

[Jason Keen]

For some odd reason, any server that has 4 NIC's teamed cannot ping a jet direct device unless I disable two. However, after a reboot, I have to enable the other two and disable again.

I have set the team to SLB but then it appears some devices do not communicate with it at all. I believe I read on here with SLB they have to be in the same switch? Would that be equivalent to having them in the same plane? Our switch has 5 switch cards into the main chassis. The whole network is gigabit over fiber between all the buildings and is a flat network. I know it isn't a routing or switching issue because I can move the device on a plain switch and it still won't ping it.

I read something on here about tcp offload engine but wasn't sure if this was similiar to our issue.

What I've done to try to fix it:
Removed all teaming, removed all NICS, rebooted.
Updated drivers, firmware, and the software all from the latest CD (7.9)
Teamed software, added static IP information. It works fine on a 2 NIC server.

I've noticed these on our 45P Blades and our DL380's that have the 4 NICs.

[Prashant Pachauri]

Hi Jason,

Uninstall the NCU, delete any registry entries you find for it from Windows Registry. Then download the latest NCU from hp.com (not the one in CD), reboot and see if it works.

Also, there is an additional option to balance by MAC Address or by IP Address. The default setting is to balance by MAC address. This setting affects what value is used by the load balancing algorithm to determine which port to use for a specific traffic flow:
Heartbeats:

- Enable Heartbeats. Enables/Disables Teaming Heartbeats at the interval specified. Heartbeats provide an additional level of NIC failure detection above simple link failure detection. When enabled, Heartbeat detection causes Heartbeat packets to be transmitted between the Primary NIC and Secondary NICs to ensure proper transmit and receive functionality among the NICs in the Team.

- Heartbeat timer interval (in milliseconds). Amount of time to wait before transmitting Heartbeat packets between NICs in the Team. Heartbeats are not transmitted between the NICs if normal network transmit/receive traffic is passing through the NICs. However, in the absence of network traffic, after the specified Heartbeat timeout period expires (the Heartbeat timer interval = 3 seconds), the Heartbeat packets are sent. This interval must be greater than 1000 ms (1 second).



Hope it helps!

[Jason Keen]

I will try that this evening and report tommorrow.

Thanks for the advice.