Nic Teaming

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Nic Teaming

webooth

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June 20, 2007 at 9:42 am

#196419

Has anyone done teaming of NIC cards? Is it worth the effort and did find any downside to it?

Thanks for any comments.

Viewing 11 posts - 1 through 10 (of 10 total)

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Steve Jones - SSC Editor SSC Guru Points: 736212 More actions · Answer 1

Do you mean the binding of two NICs to increase bandwidth? Never had that much traffic and with GB Ethernet, you'd really have to be pumping data.

I have done multi-homing and it was nice with large backups.

webooth SSCommitted Points: 1550 More actions · Answer 2

That is exactly what I mean. We have two 1GB cards on these servers and one is not being used. Seems like a waste

We do a lot of large loads at night and thought it might help.

smallmoney SSCarpal Tunnel Points: 4378 More actions · Answer 3

yeah you'd have to be pumping a lot of data.

but there is a fail safe mode where if one port on your nic or switch dies, then the second one keeps your connection up and running.

I think thats worth the setup. Depending on your environment, you might have to get with your network admin tohelp configure this especially if there are all kinds of vlans running around in their switches...out of my area of expertise.

Rudyx - the Doctor SSC-Forever Points: 43695 More actions · Answer 4

I have used NIC teaming alot on HP and IBM hardware in the past - the benefit is in not losing network availabilty - the teaming software just fails over and handles it. As for performance, separate NICs teamed on a separate subnet for backup is also another good performance and reliability enhancement.

One point of interest though - NIC teaming is not supported on clusters.

RegardsRudy KomacsarSenior Database Administrator"Ave Caesar! - Morituri te salutamus."

smallmoney SSCarpal Tunnel Points: 4378 More actions · Answer 5

Thanks for the information. I'm just curious, is NIC teaming not supported on all cluster types even majority node set cluster?

I never touched or seen a majority node set cluster but I'm curious because the quorum resides locally on each node I think.

Damn I want to go read up on this I forgot how the resources and the heart beat works in clusters.

Rudyx - the Doctor SSC-Forever Points: 43695 More actions · Answer 6

Think about it - a cluster is for high availability - if a resource fails the virtual node is moved. Add into that NIC Teaming, which in and of itself is a kind of failover, think of the programming confusion that could cause !

RegardsRudy KomacsarSenior Database Administrator"Ave Caesar! - Morituri te salutamus."

smallmoney SSCarpal Tunnel Points: 4378 More actions · Answer 7

You're absolutely right. It would be really confusing.

How does a cluster fail over I forgot.

the node registers itself as the cluster's name in DNS?

Rudyx - the Doctor SSC-Forever Points: 43695 More actions · Answer 8

Resources are registered in the Cluster Administrator as well as dependencies.

Dependent on the resource type checks are performed at various times. When things do not 'check out' a failover is initiated.

CHeck out MSDN and Technet - there is a wealth of information.

RegardsRudy KomacsarSenior Database Administrator"Ave Caesar! - Morituri te salutamus."

CC-597066 SSCommitted Points: 1637 More actions · Answer 9

rudy komacsar (9/3/2009)
One point of interest though - NIC teaming is not supported on clusters.

It does work though. Our SAP and Exchange clusters are set up with HP teaming and work fine.

Rudyx - the Doctor SSC-Forever Points: 43695 More actions · Answer 10

Agreed that it does work (we tested the same in a lab environment back in 2006).

The important thing to remember though is that if you have a production issue with this hardware configuration MS will not support you unless you first un-team things and reproduce the issue !

RegardsRudy KomacsarSenior Database Administrator"Ave Caesar! - Morituri te salutamus."