Lesson of the Day.

[synaesthesia]

Is a simple one. Never make assumptions based on what SHOULD work.

 

A couple of weeks ago, I made a simple assumption (backed up by my NM) that we should be able to team a dual port NIC on the server, straight into a dedicated switch, then also enable trunking/link aggregation on our Terastation iSCSI storage device to give us a lovely 2Gbps bandwidth with failover to our users drive (hosted on the Terastation).

Sounds easy enough. All 3 devices support link aggregation.

In fact, it should have been a 20 minute job, hence why it was done at the end of the day in termtime. 3 hours later we gave up and reverted back to how it was before.

 

Cue this morning, when we try again. I had also assumed that to enable port trunking on a HP Procurve switch we just enabled port trunking. NO. BAD HP!. We don't enable port trunking, we enable LACP instead - a feature of port trunking. GRRRR!

So, that aside, we set about teaming the NIC again, trunking the Terastation. Excellent, everything pings everything else. But would iSCSI connect? Hell no. I even gave it the benefit of the doubt, when upon restarting the server it sat at Applying Computer Settings for 45 minutes. "It's got several thousand shares on it that it needs to reapply from registry - that and quota management must take a while to reinstate".

No.

 

Whilst waiting for it to hopefully spring back into life, I entrusted my Google skills. Sure enough a fluke hit takes me to a Microsoft document hosted on Technet.

MICROSOFT DOES NOT SUPPORT NIC TEAMING/LINK AGGREGATION TO iSCSI CONNECTIONS.

 

Dammit, if only I'd known that before spending another 3 hours today trying it.

Never mind, bit the bullet and just gave the terastation it's gig link back and used the team to connect to the core network instead. So at least something good came out of it