Saturday, 11 September 2010

Intel PROSet v15 Now Supports Teaming In Server Core

NIC teaming is a valuable feature for creating redundant NIC connections to critical resources.

When it comes to configuring a Hyper-V cluster utilizing individual nodes with connection to a SAN or SANs having no single point of failure is critical.

Server Core

With the advent of v15 of Intel’s PROSet we can now create the needed NIC teams to allow for redundancy for the various Hyper-V host network connections.

Intel Modular Server

When it comes to the Intel Modular Server network configuration for a Hyper-V cluster we will need to make a few structural changes to our initial NIC set up as we did not have teaming available to us then.

This is a screenshot of the IMS rear from Modular Server Control:

image

For each node configured in the cluster we will need to team a pair of NICs with each NIC in the pair connected to a separate switch module.

  1. Hyper-V Node
    1. Team 1
      1. NIC 0 (SWM 1)
      2. NIC 0 (SWM 2)
    2. Team 2
      1. NIC 1 (SWM 1)
      2. NIC 1 (SWM 2)

Once we had our two teams set up we would configure things using the Intel PROSet utility as follows:

  1. Team 1
    1. Management IP – Default VLAN
    2. Heartbeat IP – Create and set VLAN 99
  2. Team 2
    1. Bind Hyper-V vSwitch with no host access.

Finally, once we had all of our configuration steps above completed, we would set the correct NIC binding order:

Once we have run through the configuration steps a few times, if necessary we will post a how-to step-by-step here.

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.

Windows Live Writer

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