This week I implemented a couple of Dell 2950 Servers which contained an Intel quad-port nic. The physical switch ports were setup as a trunk so I used VST(Virtual Switch Tagging). I combined the onboard Broadcom ports with the Intel quad-port nics to have the most redundant setup. When I started testing the HA and DRS functionality I noticed that not everything worked like expected. After some basic troubleshooting it seemed that about half of the packets going via the Intel quad-port nics got dropped. A ping and vmkping confirmed this, the quad-port nic seemed to be broken. Today I discovered a topic about this problem on the VMTN forum. It seems I’m not the only one experiencing this weird problems, and it seems it’s not the quad-port nic that’s broken but the driver. Weird thing is that this is only with ports that are trunked. Access ports seem to work fine. According to user “inewby” VMware is working on a fix:
VMware Support have just got back to me and confirmed that there is a known issue with Intel VT Quad Port Adapter when configured to work with Trunk ports.They told me engineering are working on it.
A temporary work around would be working with access ports only, or using the 2 onboard nics for VST and the quadport for the Service Console and VMotion with EST(external switch tagging).
I’m setting up the same configuration, Dell 2950s with 2 onboard Broadcoms and a quad-head Intel card connecting to a Cisco 3750 stack. What settings do you use for the port-channel on the switch, 802.1ad or 802.1q? And in trunk mode can the trunk pass multiple VLANs? And where do you set VST, on the physical switch or the virtual?
Sounds like you’ve done exactly what I’m trying to do, I just need to know how to go about setting it up. Also, I read the post about the updated driver for the quad-heads, so I’m getting that taken care of.
3750 Switches are perfect for this setup, you can build a cross-stack etherchannel because it’s one big stacked switch. Setup the ports on both switches as a channel and a trunk. VST means that you can tag the traffic on the virtual switch side. In other words, every portgroup you create on a specific vswitch gets an VLAN ID.
I’ve set it up as follows:
Onboard nic 1 and Quadport nic 1 = Service Console = No Etherchannel, load balancing on virtual port id, No Trunking
Onboard nic 2 and Quadport nic 2 = Virtual Machine vSwitch = Cross-stack etherchannel(802.3ad), load balacing on IP Hash! Trunk, 802.1q
Quadport nic 3 and 4 = Vmotion = No Etherchannel, load balancing on virtual port id, No Trunking
The Virtual Machine vSwitch has several port groups, each with it’s own vlan id assigned.
For more info on cross-stack click here
Good luck,