building windows 2012 service profile

[Dragomir]

i am building a windows 2012 server (not hyper V) on ucs. How should i setup the NICS? there will be more than one nic but one will be active only. 

how should i setup the vnics?

[Walter Dey]

lets assume, you would like to have eg. 2 vnic's for mgt, 2 vnic's for livemigration, 2 nic's for nfs/iscsi, 2 nic's for VM-data

And you would create a dedicated for each class of traffic.

vlan 10 mgt

vlan 20 livemigration

vlan 30 nfs/iscsi

vlan 40 VM-data

The question is how to you create this interfaces on W2012 R2 ? you have to create subinterfaces, each one is assigned a vlan (therefore native, and no vlan trunking).

For this you have to configure NIC teaming, see

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30160

Windows Server 2012 NIC Teaming (LBFO) Deployment and Management

and 4.7.3 1.1.1Adding new interfaces to the team

New team interface = secondary interface

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Below are sample PowerShell commands that can be used to team two Ethernet ports, and then create four different VLAN interfaces. The four VLANs will have VLAN ID 10, 11, 12,13. The commands assume a network adaptor with four ports that are named “Ethernet, Ethernet1, Ethernet2, Ehernet3” by the operating system. The commands shown in Example 1 below will team the first and third ports together, and then create appropriate VLANs.

• New-NetLbfoTeam -Name "Lan Team" -TeamMembers Ethernet,Ethernet2 –TeamingMode SwitchIndependent
• Add-NetLbfoTeamNic  -Team "Lan Team"  -vLanID  10 -Name "Management VLAN"
• Add-NetLbfoTeamNic  -Team "Lan Team"  -vLanID  11 -Name "Live Migration VLAN"
• Add-NetLbfoTeamNic  -Team "Lan Team"  -vLanID  12 -Name "Cluster Network VLAN"
• Add-NetLbfoTeamNic  -Team "Lan Team"  -vLanID  13 -Name "HyperV Swtich VLAN"

[Dragomir]

i actually need 2 nics. one nic is on vlan 24

another is on vlan 25

and another is iscsi nic - vlan 30

so should i build the service profile with 6 vnics?

2 per vlan and use msft teaming?

[Walter Dey]

Yes, all vlan's are configured on both fabrics, A and B. And then you have one vnic on A, the other on B, resulting in LBFO (Load Balancing and Failover)

MSFT Teaming Yes !

[Dragomir]

hi Wdey

How do I setup the boot policy to boot from virtual cd rom? I am kvm'ed to the blade

thanks

[fgarcia_22]

Hey Tonywong123, 

so we just set this up. we tried it both ways:

1.) 2 vnics on the Service Profile with Windows native NIC teaming. (the failover was instant, but you do have to manage the OS nic teaming and the configuration yourself) failover was smooth and quick. 1 ping loss or about 2 secs.

2.) 1 vnic with the fabric failover option selected. (the failover consistently took about 30 seconds; you do have only 1 vnic to manage and no OS level nic teaming BUT the failover length was not acceptable to us.)

hope this helps. 

francisco-

[Walter Dey]

Anyway: best practise is to use MSFT NIC teaming; it has multiple configurations options; hardware failover only gives you HA, but no loadsharing.