5

I have read a few contradictory articles regarding support or at least configuration with teaming of Broadcom NIC's and Hyper-V. I have a pair of Dell R805's with 4 Broadcom 5708 NIC's in them. I have teamed them up (one team for public connections and one for private connections) and I have installed Hyper-V. I am getting some intermittent connection issues though and I'm concerned that it might be due to the teaming. Basically I am wondering if anyone has successfully setup NIC teaming in the parent partition and used the teamed adapters through the Hyper-V switch. If so, what is the configuration/proper steps that you used to configure this. I have the server running Windows Server 2008 R2. Right now the server is in test mode, but my concern is that we won't see any issues until we move it into production and get some heavy traffic on the ports.

Greg Askew
  • 34,339
  • 3
  • 52
  • 81
  • What switch brand & model are you using? Is the switch set to allow dynamic LACP trunks or static trunks? – tegbains Dec 18 '09 at 15:48

5 Answers5

3

I have built 3 clusters using 3 Dell R805's and a Dell MD3000i SAN connected to one switch and had similar issues to what people are saying here. The fix was to disable "IPv4 Large Send Offload". Since doing this all clusters and 40 VM's have not missed a beat. (4 months now).

"Large Send Offload (LSO) is a feature provided by Broadcom network adapters that prevents an upper level protocol such as TCP from breaking a large data packet into a series of smaller packets with headers appended to them. The protocol stack need only generate a single header for a data packet as large as 64 KB, and the adapter hardware breaks the data buffer into appropriately-sized Ethernet frames with the correctly sequenced header (based on the single header originally provided)."

Below is a link to the full article. http://www.sadikhov.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=132434

Chris
  • 31
  • 2
3

It appears that Broadcom may have finally fixed the issue in their BACS teaming software!!!

I have only gotten a chance to do preliminary testing but our configuration is as follows: Fully Patched Windows Server 2008R2 with the latest NIC firmware (from IBM’s site) and NIC Drivers and Broadcom Management Applications Installer (BACS software) from Broadcom’s website. We are running IBM HS21 Blades with Broadcom 5708S NetXtreme II GigE NICs. Our NICs are teamed with No VLANs (testing that next) and in Smart Load Balancing with Failover mode (no standby) with LiveLink not configured. I upgraded the BACS software after first uninstalling the old (and rebooting) and did not bother with installation order of the Hyper-V Role. All Virtual Children have Dynamic MACs.

The testing at this point has been pretty basic. All that I have done so far is basically migrate a Virtual Server Child from one Host to another. However, since this never worked before (exhibiting the mentioned behavior) it seems like things should work now! I am going to continue stress testing (rebooting children on different hosts, rebooting hosts, messing with the NICs in the team to verify connectivity happens on a down path, adding VLANing, etc.) to see if all of their bugs are gone. But as stated, I now no longer have my other Hosts that at any time had that server migrated to it attempting to claim that Child server’s MAC/IP Addressing making pings go every which way.

I just wanted to get this post up in order to see if other people have similar results and to let others know this may be working now!

The download filename for BASP/BACS was BASP_BACS_Mgnt_apps_x86_64-12.64.01.zip which in Help->About shows version 12.4.5.0. The driver download was win_2k3_2k8_x86_64-12.56.01.zip which in Device Manager shows 5.2.14.0 (12/17/2009).

Jeff Atwood
  • 12,994
  • 20
  • 74
  • 92
  • +1...hopefully we get some more feedback. Do you have the driver and software version numbers you tested with? – Doug Luxem Jun 16 '10 at 21:28
1

we've successfully done this, however the downside is that there are occasional blue screens when the server reboots. There is then a support conundrum as MS dont get involved in NIC failover support and the vendor (DELL) have no answer to the blue screen issue.

If you want to touch base we can swap notes on it.
Mark

  • I never understood the whole teaming concept. In order to protect against an unlikely switch or NIC failure, you introduce software that fails about 100x more often. – duffbeer703 Jan 12 '10 at 03:11
  • @duffbber703: Amen. I've had more problems with teaming flakiness than I've ever had with NIC or switch failures. – joeqwerty Jan 12 '10 at 03:26
0

Look at this http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c01663264/c01663264.pdf.

If the teaming software is installed first, the network adapters may cease passing traffic. The resolution to this issue is to uninstall both the (HP/Broadcom/Intel) teaming software and Hyper-V, reboot the server and then reinstall Hyper-V and the teaming software.

We have the same problem, we will test the opposite order of installation tomorrow.

0

Check out this http://www.ms4u.info/2010/06/intemittent-ping-timeout-on-hyper-v.html

This is how is solve the issue.