HP Servers NIC Teaming Load Balancing with 3550's

[emanue0621]

Hello,

I have a few new HP Proliant Servers with two FastEthernet adapters with HP's NIC Teaming. What would be the best load balancing solutiong in pluggin these servers to 2-3550's which will then be load balanced with two 4503's?

I heard of the Swith-assisted Load Balancing mode, also heard of Cisco's Fast EtherChannel/Gigabit Etherchannel which is a layer 2 load balancing technology- but I'm not sure this would be the best solution for the HP servers.

Being that I'm fairly new to this, I'm in desperate need of help.

To further explain the setup, basically one port on the HP Proliant server is going to 1-Cisco 3550 and the second port on the HP Proliant Server is going to the second 3550.

Hope to hear some feedback.

Thanks in advance,

Emanuel

[vinodmorsa]

Yes, you can do that. It will work perfectly.

[msdonahue]

Please read thr following from HP's NIC Teaming Documentation:

slb - switch-assisted load balancing

SLB was formerly known as Fast EtherChannel (FEC) / Gigabit EtherChannel (GEC) teaming. For even higher performance, it incorporates all the features of NFT and TLB to provide:

• Adapter fault tolerance,

• Load balancing of all traffic being transmitted from the server, and

• Load balancing of traffic received by the server

With SLB Teaming, there are from two to eight network adapters in a team and up to eight teams in a server. All adapters transmit and receive using the same speed. This approach must be used in conjunction with an intelligent switch (such as switches from HP, Cisco, Extreme, Intel, and Bay/Nortel among others) that supports this type of teaming, and all ports must be connected to the same switch.

[emanue0621]

thanks for the reply.

Would I have to configure load balancing on the swithes or just configure SLB on the Servers that would be it.

Thanks,

Emanuel