Strange Virtual Connect Behaviour.

[Christopher Peate]

Hi everyone, I'm after some advice regarding a Virtual Connect configuration I'm putting together.
I've set up the two VC modules with three ethernet networks, the first two have a pair of gigabit uplinks each, and are configured as VLAN tunnelling with Smart Link.
On the external switch side they are configured as an etherchannel trunk, with the three server VLANs allowed to pass traffic across the connection.
The third link is a ethernet network purely for internal cluster communication, with no associated uplinks.
The server profiles are then configured as per my attachment and teamed on the Cluster blades as three network teams, the first with 802.11q enabled, the second with the transmit and recieve path validation disabled and then attached to a hyper-v virtual switch and the third with a basic team.
All are using transmit load balancing with fault tolerance.

Where I seem to be having an issue is with the teaming failover, if I simulate an upstream switch failure by disconnecting a pair of links on one of the modules, what I would expect is for smart link to kick in and communications to be uninterrupted. Unfortunately what happens is that the blades drop communication to each other on the public cluster network, though I can ping each of the blades seperately from another computer, across the still-active second etherchannel.
I found if I then went and disabled the disconnected ethernet network, communications between blades would be restored, and looking at the properties of the teamed adapter, the expected flex-nic connection was showing as disconnected. I've gone over the VC documentation again, but can't see anything that would explain the behaviour.
Anyone have any idea what could be going on?

[HEM_2]

Christopher:

I think your problem has to do with how Smartlink operates in a Flex10 environment currently. Review this article:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&objectID=c01780345&jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN

essentially, when you induce smartlink for a network, all "carved-out" Flex NICs will get disabled if one of those FlexNICs is a member of that network.

[Christopher Peate]

Thanks for that I'll have a look.