Dell Configuration Guide for the S4048–ON System 9.14.2.6

NLB Unicast Mode Scenario

Consider a topology in which you configure four servers, S1 through S4, as a cluster or a farm. This set of servers connects to a Layer 3 switch, which connects to the end-clients. The servers contain a single IP address (IP-cluster address of 172.16.2.20) and a single unicast MAC address (MAC-Cluster address of 00-bf-ac-10-00-01) for load-balancing. Because multiple ports on a switch cannot learn a single MAC address, the servers are assigned MAC addresseses of MAC-s1 to MAC-s4), respectively, on S1 through S4 in addition to the MAC cluster address. All the servers of the cluster belong to VLAN1.

In Unicast NLB mode, the following sequence of events occurs:

• The switch sends an ARP request to resolve the IP address to the cluster MAC address.

• The ARP servers send an ARP response with the MAC cluster address in the ARP header and a MAC address of MAC-s1/s2/s3/s4 (for servers S1 through S4) in the Ethernet header.

• The switch associates the IP address with the MAC cluster address with the last ARP response it obtains. Assume that the last ARP reply is obtained from MAC-s4 (assuming that the ARP response with MAC-s4 is received as the last one). The interface associated with server, S4, is added to the ARP table.

• With NLB enabled, after learning the NLB ARP entry, all the subsequent traffic floods on all ports in VLAN1.

To perform load-balancing, NLB, forwards the data frame to all the servers.

NLB Multicast Mode Scenario

Consider a topology in which you configure four servers, S1 through S4, as a cluster or a farm. This set of servers connects to a Layer 3 switch, which connects to the end-clients. They contain a single multicast MAC address (MAC-Cluster: 03-00-5E-11-11-11).

In Multicast NLB mode, configure a static ARP configuration command to associate the cluster IP address with a multicast cluster MAC address.

With Multicast NLB mode, the data forwards to all the servers based on the port specified using the following Layer 2 multicast command in CONFIGURATION MODE:

mac-address-table static <multicast_mac> multicast vlan <vlan_id> output-range <port1>, <port2>

Limitations of the NLB Feature

The following limitations apply to switches on which you configure NLB:

• The NLB Unicast mode uses switch flooding to transmit all packets to all the servers that are part of the VLAN. When a large volume of traffic is processed, the clustering performance might be impacted in a small way. This limitation is applicable to switches that perform unicast flooding in the software.

• The ip vlan-flooding command applies globally across the system and for all VLANs. In cases where NLB is applicable and ARP replies contain a discrepancy in the Ethernet SHA and ARP header SHA frames, a flooding of packets over the relevant VLAN occurs.

• The maximum number of concurrent clusters that is supported is eight.

Microsoft Clustering

To provide transparent failover or balancing, Microsoft clustering allows multiple servers using Microsoft Windows to be represented by one MAC address and IP address. The Dell EMC Networking OS does not recognize server clusters by default; you must configure it to do so. When an ARP request is sent to a server cluster, either the active server or all the servers send a reply, depending on the cluster configuration. If the active server sends a reply, the Dell EMC switch learns the active server’s MAC address. If all servers reply, the switch registers only the last received ARP reply and the switch learns one server’s actual MAC address; the virtual MAC address is never learned. Because the virtual MAC address is never learned, traffic is forwarded to only one server rather than the entire cluster, and failover and balancing are not preserved.

To preserve failover and balancing, the switch forwards the traffic destined for the server cluster to all member ports in the VLAN connected to the cluster. To ensure that this happens, use the ip vlan-flooding command on the Dell EMC switch when you configure the Microsoft cluster. The server MAC address is given in the Ethernet frame header of the ARP reply, while the virtual MAC address representing the cluster is given in the payload. Then, all the traffic destined for the cluster is flooded out of all member ports. Because all the servers in the cluster receive traffic, failover and balancing are preserved.

Enable and Disable VLAN Flooding

• The older ARP entries are overwritten whenever newer NLB entries are learned.

• All ARP entries, learned after you enable VLAN flooding, are deleted when you disable VLAN flooding, and RP2 triggers an ARP resolution. Disable VLAN flooding with the no ip vlan-flooding command.

• When you add a port to the VLAN, the port automatically receives traffic if you enabled VLAN flooding. Old ARP entries are not deleted or updated.

• When you delete a member port, its ARP entries are also deleted from the content addressable memory (CAM).

• Port channels in the VLAN also receive traffic.

• There is no impact on the configuration from saving the configuration.

• If you enable VLAN flooding, it displays in the show running-config command output that displays the ip vlan-flooding CLI configuration. This is the only output where you see the VLAN flooding status (enabled or disabled).