Problem with bond from two nics

[Marcel de Jager]

Hi There,

We have bought a Lefthand P4300 starter pack. I installed it and all works fine. To increase preformance, and add some security, we wanted to use both NIC's on the lefthand. I created a trunk on the 5400 switch and made a bond of both the nics. However when I use both NIC's the connection with the san is lost and when I use 1 nic and reboot a san it has communication error.
When looking at this problem I found in the manual that I had to make the bond before attaching the lefthand to a management group. When doing it later ( like I did) it give sthe problems that I have.

However I cannot find a sollution to solve the problem. Anyone any ideas?

Thanks,

Marcel de Jager

P.S. This thread has been moevd from Storage Area Networks (SAN) (Small and Medium Business) to HP StoreVirtual Storage / LeftHand. - Hp Forum moderator

[Gregory Boehnlein]

I am sure that you have already figured this out, but the best way to run the Lefthand stuff is in an Adaptive Load Balancing bond strategy, which does NOT require you to configure anything on your switch. This is what we uses accross our 3 x P4500 x 2 Switch setup into our Vmware cluster.

[Matthew S. Luth]

Hi Marcel,

We use 802.3ad (LACP) bonded adapters on our Lefhand iSCSI nodes and they work just fine. We recently migrated our storage nodes to Cisco Nexus 5010 switches but we had previously had them running on Cisco 3750 stacks. The Nexus configs are a bit different so I won't confuse you with those. Here is the configuration we used on the 3750 switches for each port in the port-channel:

description LHN009 802.3ad
switchport access vlan 3
switchport mode access
channel-group 25 mode active
spanning-tree portfast
spanning-tree bpduguard enable


Obviously your vlan and channel-group designations may be different than what is shown here. It is important that you use "active" and not "on" for the channel-group mode in order to activate the 802.3ad protocol required by Lefthand.

The other important thing to note is that channel-groups only work within the same physical chassis or in a "management domain" where multiple chassis are managed as one. They will not work across two, discreet chassis.

Let me know if you need more assistance.

Matt