Intel PROSet Adapter Teaming In Server Core and Hyper-V Server 2008 R2

It turns out that creating an Intel adapter team in Server Core, or in this case Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 is actually quite simple.

• Previous Blog Post: Intel PROSet v15 Now Supports Teaming In Server Core

Reading through the above page plus the PROSetCL.txt file made things seem a bit intimidating.

In reality, the process is actually quite simple. The PROSetCL.exe command is found in: C:\Program Files\Intel\DMIX\CL.

Here is the process assuming that we are in the above directory:

1. PROSetCL Adapter_Enumerate
   • The NIC’s index number is at the front of each NIC listed.
   • 
2. IPConfig /all
   • NIC MAC addresses are needed to map which NICs we need to team.
   • On the Intel Modular Server, the NIC’s MAC addresses will be close together for the on board NIC and again close together for the Mezzanine based NICs.
3. PROSetCL Team_Create 4,2 TEAM1 VMLB
   • Where the numbers “4” and “2” are the index number for each NIC we want in the team.
   • We team one on board NIC and one mezzanine based NIC to allow for switch redundancy.
   • The management and heartbeat team will be ALB configured.
   • The team that we will bind the Hyper-V vSwitch to will be configured for Virtual Machine Load Balancing (VMLB).

Once we ran the above commands we saw:

Note the adapter team shown as TEAM1 will be our management and heartbeat NIC.

Further reading:

• Intel Support: Network Connectivity: Teaming with Advanced Networking Services (ANS)
  • Explains the types of teaming available to us.

UPDATE 2010-09-20: A post on configuring the needed VLANs:

• Blog Post: Intel PROSet Adapter Team – Creating a VLAN Setup for Clustering on IMS

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

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