802.1q trunks to servers?

[Jonas Back_1]

There are several posts in the forum regarding 802.1Q trunks and NICs but I still can't get it to work. What am I missing?

What we simply want to do is to connect our Windows 2000 Server installed on a DL380G3 (with NC7781 NIC) to a 802.1q trunk port. No VLANs are cleared from the trunk.

What we want to do is have the NIC to be configured to be on both:
VLAN10 (192.168.10.0/24) and
VLAN20 (192.168.20.0/24)

What else do you have to do except configuring the IP-adresses for the NIC? Can't find any settings ni the driver. We have also tried teaming the NICs and connecting the NICs to seperate switches and configuring them as trunks.

[Ron Kinner]

Doesn't look too good for Win2K. You may have to go to XP (ugh!) to get full support for vlan tagging.

See A19 on

http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/servers/networking/questionanswer.html

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/network/hh/network/103prog_4qjr.asp

Apparently there are some higher level programs called NDIS Intermediate Drivers which can do the tagging. When they do they have to make entries in the Registry for each VLAN. See:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/network/hh/network/204_802p_5i3r.asp

and

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/network/hh/network/204_802p_5raf.asp

That being said there are new drivers which just came out last week for your Proliant. Perhaps one of them will add the feature.

http://h18023.www1.hp.com/support/files/server/us/locate/20_4706.html

Ron

[Ron Kinner]

If you are willing to change to Intel you might get it to work:

http://www.intel.com/support/network/adapter/ans/ieeevlans.htm

Ron

[JedE]

Has anybody managed to set up VLANs using NIC 7781 on Windows 2003, DL380 G3 ?

I've got two VLANS configured on a teamed interface and I get intermittent reachability on one of the VLANs. The remote end of the link is a Cisco 2950 configured as 802.1q trunk.

On VLAN 109 all works well and I can run a continous ping test to a remote IP node also in VLAN 109.

On VLAN 200 I can only ping a remote node in VLAN 200 intermittently i.e. a few pings work, then a couple fail, then some pings work and so on. All very strange ... implies the basics are working but somehow packets are getting dropped.

I saw some mention of VLAN problems somewhere with Broadcom cards ... this is anintegrated 7781 which I think uses Broadcom. Anybody tried out VLANS in this config ?

I've also tried a similar setup on an EVO 530 using a Broadcom NETXtreme and all I ever get is 'connection failed' when I try to enable the newly created VLAN. So, in this config I can't even get to the point of sending data over the interface.

Comments ?

Thanks

Jed

[Jonas Back_2]

I can't remember exactly but we did get this to work! I'm sure it was a DL380G3 and also C2950-switches and running Windows 2000. Then I think I did this: NIC1 connected to one switch and NIC2 to another. First I teamed the NICs to form one virtual adapter. Then I did the VLAN configruation which gave me another 2 virtual NIC:s and I configured each of them with the right config for that particular VLAN.

Everything worked just fine. Can't remember I saw any problems ping:ing anywhere.

Problems I remember I an into, but quickly solved, was to get the latest drivers, make sure the ports are trunked with dot1q.

However we don't use it today it was cool to see that it really worked ;).

Can't say what could be wrong. Maybe you have to disabled spanningtree on the ports?

[JedE]

I haven't been able to check the drives yet ... it's on the list of things to do.

Spanning tree is already disabled on the switch .. but either way it shouldn't really interfere. The fact that this problem is intermitent makes me wonder if it's a bug ... it's also something that folks might not notice too as the first test they do will probably show it working fine. I didn't actually try running any apps other than ICMP ping over the interface so not sure how poorly the link would operate.

Our alternative is to use additional NICs which we will do now .. but I'd really like to get this working to know I can do it in the future. Same goes for the EVO 530 which was in an even worse state !

[Jonas Back_2]

To be honest I only did pings aswell to make sure the redundancy worked. I know there was some bugs (or maybe 802.1q trunks to servers didn't work at all?) in that COmpaq Supportpack I used back then (like 6.10) but when I moved to 6.20 it worked just fine.

[Kraut]

Finding NIC for 380DL that supports 802.1q, VLAN tagging ... are there any recommended adapters? Do all Intel adapters work with 380DL servers (Intel adapters as per http://support.intel.com/support/network/sb/CS-009743.htm link)?

Thanks for any help,
Kraut