Cat6500: How does failover take place with NIC teaming

[new_networker]

hi,

Lets say a server farm is connected to a switch on dual Cat6500 chasis with NIC teaming i.e. one NIC is connected to Cat6500 (1) and the other NIC is connected to CAT6500 (2). Now the active NIC on 'one' of the servers goes down, how will the failover to the other switch happen. Will the complete switch be failed over. Or would this force a shift of all the servers to the second switch. What and how will it occur ?

Rgds.

[Jon Marshall]

If the active NIC on the server goes down the server will use it's other NIC. Neither of the switches would failover, and only the server with the failed NIC will failover not all servers.

This assumes that your 2 6500 switches are connected by a layer 2 trunk link.

Jon

[new_networker]

So, does it mean that both the switches are in active/active mode.

[Jon Marshall · Accepted solution]

Both switches will be forwarding traffic yes. Try not to think of a pair of switches as active/standby.

Jon

[AJAZ NAWAZ]

The other question which needs to be asked is what happens if the primary or active switch fails?, how will NIC teaming respond?. In both cases the NICteaming should kick in, as well as spanning-tree or HSRP on the network side. In this case you should think of active/standby. I say this just for the sake of completeness.

On this point NICteaming is quite a subject. HW vendors have their own implementations on what should occur given a particular event or failure.

hth,

Ajaz