Dual-home servers on redundant 6500s

[s-pirrello]

Hi,

I'm in the process of adding an additional 6509 for distribution and access (specifically for servers). If we dual-home our servers to two separate 6500s, how does one handle the IP addressing for the secondary NICs on the servers? How does the server know to begin using the second NIC if an outage is not directly related to the port that the primary NIC is connected to?

[Collin Clark]

That's configured in Windows/*nix usually with an application that comes with your NIC. For example HP uses 'NIC Teaming' and has software for configuring just that. One NIC is active and passing traffic and the other is just active. There is a virtual MAC used for the team. If the primary NIC loses connectivity, the secondary takes over.

Hope that helps