A fun gotcha setting up a Hyper-V cluster on HPE Synergy blades with ILO 5.3

[urvasjets]

We got our third HPE Synergy chassis last week and went about setting up a hyper-v cluster on it. All the config went smoothly and the first blade was fine, connecting to the SAN, rest of the network, etc. Setup blades 2 and 3 and things get unstable. We can't setup iSCSI connections or ping between hosts on the LM and CSV networks. We're checking configs on Synergy and switches. Confirming LACP is setup right and generally pulling our hair out.

The big clue came from networking when they said they weren't seeing all the hosts MAC addresses on the switches. Check from the Windows side and all the MACs are the same across all three hosts. Huh? We were doing some cross training so we set each one up manually so it wasn't an image issue. Did some digging and the MAC pool on all three servers was the same.

Hyper-V builds the MAC address pool on a host based on the first IP address that the server has. It turns out in 5.3 HPE added a USB network adapter so you can access ILO from the host OS. It has a fixed IP so they are all have the same IP address. So all three hosts built their MAC pool with the same seed and ended up with the same pools. We use virtual adapters on the hosts and therefore they all had the same MACs.

The fix was to change the MAC pools and re-create the virtual adapters. After that everything was smooth. Just a heads up if you're building a cluster on new HPE hardware to disable those ILO adapters first.

[Suman_1978]

Hi,

Thankyou for giving this information, it will be helpful to ofther community members.

Thank You!
I work with HPE but opinions expressed here are mine.
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[ChrisLynch]

I think when you stated 5.3, you were referring to the HPE OneView/Synergy 5.30 release.  That does not indicate an SPP/SSP version, only the OneView software version installed on the Composer(s).  Can you provide the SPP/SSP version you applied to your environment?  Or what iLO firmware version was deployed?