Heartbeat Issue with Compaq NIC Team

[Jim Odom]

I have a HP Proliant DL 380 G3 Running Windows 2000 SP 3 with 4 NIC cards installed. I have the 2 integrated NICS (Compaq NC7781)and 2 NC7131. I have them set up with two NIC teams with one NC7781 NIC and one NC7131 NIC in each team. I am experiencing issues with one of these teams. I have a degraded status on the NIC team and when monitoring it shows a heartbeat error on one of the network connections. I swapped network cables and the problem follows, but the network guys have double checked and say nothing is different between any of the network connections.

Any clues here as to what might be causing my heartbeat error?

[Tony Glynn_1]

Are you using teaming on the heartbeat?

Don't! Set your HB up as a simple connection only using just 1 NIC on either side.

Disable everything on the HB except for TCP/IP (this includes the Microsoft clients). In the Cluster manager, set it up so that the HB connection is highest priority. Configure the client connection (your main NIC team) so that it supports client and cluster communication. That way you get redundancy if the HB NIC combo fails. Make sure you HB IP nets are completely out of any other range used in your network - I had a prob once where the HB had a net IP address which was used elsewhere and the cluster was trying to route traffic up the HB.

[Jim Odom]

No Clustering at. Just using NIC teaming for hardware fault tolerance. Should I uncheck the box for heartbeat during NIC team setup? What is the Heartbeat used for?

Thanks,

Jim

[Tony Glynn_1]

Sorry Jim,

I just assumed that heartbeat meant cluster! I'm assuming that in a FT Team it determines if the other NICS are alive and connected. Which teaming are you using? My preference is always ALB - gives you full transmit bandwidth with fault tolerance