Could not establish SSL\TSL connection with NLB and HP Network Team on DL360 G4

[KirillVU]

This issue firstly appeared after SP1 for Windows Server 2003 was installed on all the network servers. Before the SP1 install the environment hadn’t have any issues similar to this one.
After SP1 install the whole system faced intermittent errors while establishing connection with NLB clusters addresses of the servers. These connection errors are of sporadic nature and occur from time to time. We used the special Microsoft tool named WFetch to trace HTTPS communications between the affected servers and saw that on average every five connection ended with the following error: “The underlying connection was closed: Could not establish secure channel for SSL/TLS.”. After dissolving HP Network Teaming this issue disappears. But at the moment the servers connections have lost hardware redundancy and the network bandwidth is decreased from 2 Gb/s down to 1 Gb/s. Does anyone know how to resolve this? What should we do to upgrade to SP1 without errors?

[Rune J. Winje]

When you use Microsoft's NLB there may be problems with teamed NIC's

The reason why is that the network team in some configurations uses heartbeats to poll/check the status of the team. This can be in conflict with Microsoft's NLB heartbeat. Another problem is that two "layers" of virtual MAC addresses may not work.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/278431/

Best suggestion I can give is to check you have the latest NIC drivers and NCU (Network Configuration Utility)(=teaming driver) installed. If still problems I would recommend not using teaming due to the above.


Cheers,
Rune