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Multiple Vendor NICs in MPIO to EqualLogic PS 4000
Hi,
We have two Dell R610s with 10 NICs connecting to a Dell EqualLogic PS 4000 SAN.
The NICs on the R610s are as follows:
- Motherboard - 4 x Broadcom NICs
- Expansion Slot 1 - 2 x Broadcom NICs
- Expansion Slot 2 - 4 x Intel NICs (purchased later as Broadcom add-ins were out of stock for two months)
The SAN has two controllers.
The server is being used for a Hyper-V High Availability cluster, and I would like to use NIC teaming to provide resilient connections for the managment and VM Networks.
As NIC Teaming doesn't work cross-vendor (AFAIK) I will be forced to use the two BroadCom NICs in Expansion slot 1 for this purpose in order for the connection to survive a failure on one of the NIC cards.
This means that we would need to configure our MPIO SAN connections across the BroadCom and Intel NICs.
Can anyoe advise if this is an acceptable configuration please?
Thank you for your help.
Kind regards,
Roland
Anonymous
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January 24th, 2011 09:00
Hello,
The problem you are going to have is that MS doesn't support teaming with iSCSI. See the release notes/user guide for confirmation. So for iSCSI traffic MPIO is a must. For your management and other non iSCSI traffic, teaming is fine. I can't speak to every combination of teaming across NIC vendors but to be safe and get support if there's ever a problem staying within vendors is a good idea. Even for iSCSI keeping them within the same vendor is a good idea.
Please make sure the array FW is at least 4.3.7 and that your HyperV nodes have KB978562 installed. I believe you are talking about W2K8R2, correct? That KB is a fix to the validation suite.
Regards,
-don