HP Network Configuration Utility question

[Chris Howlett_1]

I am running the HP Network Configuration Utility v7 under W2k3 a DL360 and have a question with regards to Teaming. I can?t seem to find any documentation, so was looking for advice.

Should I statically assign IP addresses to each Interface prior enabling the team, or do I only need to assign a static address to the virtual adapter which is created?

What benefit is there to configuring the Team as Fault Tolerant over Load Balancing? What a Load Balanced Team failover fail over should one link fail?

[Ed Cox · Accepted solution]

Hi Chris,
Don't assign any IP addresses to the NICs before teaming as they will lose those addresses anyway once the team is established. Wait until the team is in place and assign the static address to the virtual miniport driver.

Teaming benefits:
Fault tolerant is simply one active nic doing all the work with an "online" spare nic in reserve in case the primary fails. The secondary card is sending heartbeat signals about every 3000ms to see if the primary is still responding. If it is not, the teaming driver switches control to the secondary nic, bringing with it the MAC address and IP bindings of the Primary card. by default it's a one-way fail over to the secondary card.

The other two choices are:
Transmit Load balancing and Switch assisted load balancing.
TLB uses one nic as the incoming or receiver of traffic and the rest of the cards are used strictly as senders or transmitters. These "senders" also send those heartbeat signals as well so that if the primary receiver goes down the next card in line takes over the reception duties. (Randy Moss goes to Oakland, Marcus Robinson takes over). This method is also switch independent...

The Switch Assisted Load balancing (SLB) is similar except ALL cards receive because the switch is load balancing the incoming traffic for those ports and our teaming driver is balancing the outgoing traffic (like it did in TLB).
Both TLB and SLB have failover capabilities which is handled by the teaming driver.
Ed

[Kevin Karr]

I have a question regarding setting up the teaming adapter for a DL380 G2. I've had an issue with setting my teaming adapter to TLB mode due to getting a Rx Heartbeat failure problem with the secondary NIC so I set it to SLB (switch assisted mode) and the error went away. How can I tell that this mode is working correctly ? Everything seems to check out in the diagnostics and the information screens ?

Also, I'm now getting a windows Service error on startup of the server in relation to the network Load Balancing Service Event ID 7000. I've read MSKB 833375 but want to know if I could just remove the the service or do I have to follow that MSKB and remove the reg entries as told. I just want to make sure that the HP Teaming will work after doing this.

I'd appreciate any thoughts.

Thanks

Kevin.
KEvin