NIC Teaming Supported on UCS

[Muhammad321]

Hi Everyone,

Hope you are all good.

My question is if we installed windows on bear metal blade with two vNics, let say vnic01's one primary path is Fabric-A and vnic02's primary path is Fabric-B both vnics are enable for fabric failover. In this case can we do NIC-Teaming or LACP is it supported in UCS Design?

Thanks in advance

Regards

Muhammad Hasan

[Walter Dey]

Hi Muhammad

Best practise: don't use hardware failover (by UCS); use this feature in software, offered by the OS, Windows 2012 in your case.

see misc. discussions in this forum and 

Windows Server 2012 NIC Teaming (LBFO) Deployment and Management

https://download.microsoft.com/download/F/6/5/F65196AA-2AB8-49A6-A427-373647880534/[Windows%20Server%202012%20NIC%20Teaming%20(LBFO)%20Deployment%20and%20Management].docx

Walter.

[Muhammad321]

Ok But can I configure LACP on server side with two vnics with different fabrics, would it work or we can not configure the LACP on server side?

[Walter Dey · Accepted solution]

see my comment in

https://supportforums.cisco.com/discussion/12234111/has-anyone-heard-ucs-blades-crashing-all-them-whenif-you-put-esxi-55-lacp

I think even N1k, or VMware DVS wouldn’t help; they support LACP, but UCS FI don’t. Southbound !

To be precise:

You would not use LACP for NIC teaming because that would require the 6200s to be clustered together in a vPC domain, and that is not supported. For NIC teaming you could use standard active/standby teaming, the unique vNIC “fabric failover” capability in UCS, or in the case of a VMware host you can also use active/active NIC load balancing based on vPort-ID or Mac Pinning.

The UCS Fabric Interconnect (FI) supports LACP (Link Aggregation Control Protocol) for uplink ethernet port channels. Northbound !

[Muhammad321]

Thank you Walter Dey. Is there any new hardware coming for UCS that support this active/active feature.

[rikelme10]

Hello!!

I have the same scenario, nowadays is it possible to do LACP NIC teaming with recent UCS and FI versions? I mean, UCS FI is able to support LACP Southbound?

Regards

 

[Steven Tardy]

Why do you want LACP southbound?
What problem are you trying to solve?

UCS DOES do LACP from the FI northbound.
UCS DOES do port-channel from the FI southbound to IOMs / FEXs / IFMs / multiport VIC on C-Series.
UCS DOES do port-channel from the IOMs / FEXs / IFMs to B-Series / C-Series.

The UCS Servers behind a UCS FI can NOT do LACP across multiple switching hops to a northbound switch.
There is zero need to do this.

Given a generic topology:
    Server <> Nexus 2k <> Nexus 5k <> Nexus 7k
Would you expect the Server to form a LACP port-channel with the Nexus 7k (skipping over the Nexus 2k and Nexus 5k)?
That is effectively what you are asking to do.