Configuring NIC Teaming between Windows 2016 Server and SG300
I have recently been working on provisioning a 2016 Hyper V Server for a customer which I will be installing in the next coming week. As part of the project, the customer has 3 x SG300 Cisco SOHO Switches. The Server being provided is a HP GEN 9 ML350 which comes with 4 x NIC’s built in
In an attempt to provide better throughput and also an aspect of redundancy I decided I wanted to employ NIC teaming. For this, to work, It needs to be configured on both the Server and the switch ports it connect’s too. The more fiddly part is that of the switch side as this will vary depending on the switches that you use. The settings, however, have to match both on the switch and the server. Teaming I wanted to have was as follows
- NIC 1 & 2 will be the Physical Host Team and connect to Switchports 1 & 2 respectively
- NIC 3 & 4 will be the Hyper V Team and connect to ports 3 & 4
With this in Mind we now need to configure the Server and the Switch
Server Configuration
Under Server Manager, go to the following
- Local Server
- Midway down the top box you will see NIC Teaming, even if this says disabled. Clicking on it will bring up the the next window
- Click on Tasks and select add new team
- As shown above we will need to give the team a name and select the NOCS we want to include. Set teaming Mode to LACP, Balancing to Dynamic
Switch Configuration
Once you have achieved the basic settings on the SG300 you will now need to configure the ports that your server NIC’s will connect to for each team. To reach the area in the GUI where we can configure the ports go to
- Port management
- Link Aggregation
- LAG Management
Select the LAG you want to configure and be sure to do the following
- Give it a name
- Chech LACP Enable
- Put the ports you want into LAG members and click apply
If you wish to configure this on a IOS Based switch then the following commands should help
|
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 |
interface Port-channel1 description Etherchannel To Hyper-V Host switchport trunk encapsulation dot1q switchport mode trunk # Switch Ports (See channel group number corrasponds with port channel number) # Channel Group "Active" is LACP # Load Balancing mode in Windows must be "Address Hash" interface GigabitEthernet0/1 description Link to Hyper-V Host switchport trunk encapsulation dot1q switchport mode trunk channel-group 1 mode active interface GigabitEthernet0/2 description Link to Hyper-V Host switchport trunk encapsulation dot1q switchport mode trunk channel-group 1 mode active |
Once you configure your switch it will take a 30-60 seconds to ensure the links come up. however when they do you will see them go to an ‘active’ state under adapters and interfaces
Under network connections you should now see some new adapters for your NIC team – It is shown as a ‘Microsoft Network Adapter Multiplexor Driver. Fpr the Host team we will need to configure this with the IP address details of our Hyper V Host
For the Hyper V team NIC we will not want to give this a static but rather select it as our Hyper V Switch