Server NIC Adapter Teaming and Cisco Catalyst Switches

[mattdud]

We currently support 2 typse of Adapter Teaming on INTEL and 3Com server NIC's - Load Balancing (1 in many out) and Fault Tolerance (multi NIC but only 1 at any one time).

Customer is upgrading to Cisco and VLAN's/FEC. We have servers at Cisco and Nortel LAN sites with and without VLAN's and we have had to use Fault Tolerance. When Load Balanced we have had performance problems.

On later NIC's there is a FEC option.

My question is has anybody used Load Balancing in a teamed environment connected to Cisco's with VLAN's and/or FEC and if so how?

Also has anyone used the NIC FEC option to Cisco Catalyst switches and if so were any problems experienced?

[ssoberlik]

You could refer to the following document which describes load balancing with FEC, but I haven't tried this.

http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/473/4.html

You can also use trunking for Inter-vlan communication and the configuration is described here.

http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/473/158.html

To find out if your NIC supports ISL and also for vendor information refer:

http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/cc/techno/media/lan/ether/channel/prodlit/fchan_an.htm

[glen.grant]

I know we had to turn teaming off in order to get MLB to work correctly . We worked on this a month before figuring it out , don't know if their are other solutions .