Fault Tolerant Switchs Question?

[eboardman]

I would like to take 2 switches that will have about 7 servers connected to them. Say they all Connect to switch A. I need a method that is switch A fails (Power supply blows or something along that line) that switch B will then take on the connections with no user intervention. Can this only be done with Network Adapter Teaming and having the 2 switches in the same VLan or is there any other ways this can be achieved. Any advice would be appreciated. Thank you.

[efrahim]

Yes this can be done with the nic team, either use adaptive load balancing or just fault tolerance one- They have to be in the same vlan and have the connection between two switches- Here is the example of types of nic teaming you can have. ..

http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/servers/networking/teaming.html

[eboardman]

Thank you for the reply. I have planned on using a nic team so that is what I will go with. I have one more question on this redundancy plan. Lets say I have a ethernet drop which is my connection to the Internet. That goes into a redundant set of firewalls. Now the firewall A plugs in to the switch A and I have the teamed nics split up between switch A and switch B. If switch A fails how do I retain my internet connection when the firewall is plugged in to switch a and not B. Do I some how need connection to the net in both switches and how is that achieved. Any info would be great. Thank you.

[efrahim]

if the switch fails, then the primary firewall also fails over to the secondary firewall but if only the port which is connected to the server fails there must be link between two switches and when the server failed over to the secondary nic (connected to the switch b) then use that link between two switches to get to the primary firewall on the switch a

hope this helps