Teaming NICs w/Cisco 3020 on BL860c Windows 2003 Itanium

[Five Tenets]

What are the best practices and things to not do when trying to team 4 nics of a BL860c across 2 Cisco 3020 switches in a C7000 enclosure?

I am trying to find docs but am unable.

For example, can you team across switches? Can you team the MS Cluster? Can you team over interconnects?

[Lmm_1]

The following document will provide you a lot of details on NIC teaming for Itanium servers:

http://docs.hp.com/en/5992-0992/nic_teaming_whitepaper.pdf

Having 4 NICs and 2 switches there are many different ways of configuring the team, if you need only 1 IP assigned to the server you can create a TLB team, 2 NICs going to each switch, it doesnt require Switch config it will be the default team mode, this way you will get 4GbTX and 1GbRX.

You can also create 2 different teams, using a set of NICs going to the same switch, then you configure port aggregation on the switch (Static or LACP), you will get 2Gb Tx/Rx each.

if you have any question let me know.

[Five Tenets]

Thanks!

More specifically, Can you Team a BL860c in a C7000 enclosure across 2 Cisco 3020s?

Meaning can I team NIC 1 and 2 where NIC 1 comes from 1 3020 and NIC 2 comes from another 3020?

I'm asking because the team keeps logging a loss of connection or a dissconnect error inside Event Viewer of Windows and I don't see any network issues.

Thanks again!

[Lmm_1]

You can do it, only TLB or NFT Mode. You need to make sure there is a valid path between those ports, otherwise the team hearbeat frame mechanism will report an RX path validation failure.

[Five Tenets]

How about TLB w/FT? We have it set for Automtica mode and the HP Teaming software selected TLB w/FT.

Can that be teamed across 2 Cisco 3020s?

Thanks again!

[Lmm_1 · Accepted solution]

Thats TLB, you have fault tolerance and load balacing. Load Balancing for TX only, traffic will be received on 1 NIC only. You can see that under the NIC roles on NCU, 1 will be TX/RX the other one RX only.