Nic teaming on ESX 5.1 and failover on UCS

[bellnhshosting]

Hi all,

Had a quick question. I know i read it before but i just cant find the reference again. What is the recommended setting between allowing vNic Enable failover policy on cisco UCS and  network setting on ESX 5.1?

I know i had read somewhere when nic teaming is set up on ESX with failover allowed on UCS, ESX goes haywire if one path is lost on UCS.

Our setup runs on UCS manager 2.04a with a mix of M2 and M3 blades with M81kr and 1240/1280 cards respectively.

[bellnhshosting]

Actually found the reference , its in the firmware upgrade guide itself:

"

All connectivity may be lost during firmware upgrades if you have configured both Enable Failover on one

or more vNICs and you have also configured NIC teaming/bonding at the host operating system level. Please

design for availability by using one or the other method, but never both.

"

Is this still valid? Whats the setting to be done on ESX nic teaming if we wanna use Enable failover on UCS?

[lwatta · Accepted solution]

Never use fabric failover with a hypervisor vswitch. Let the failover mechanism of the vSwitch handle the network outage.

For ESX once you have two nics attached to the vSwitch or a DVS it will automatically load balance and failover. You don't want to combine that with the UCS Fabric Failover.

louis