[j-nsp] Juniper EX, HP server NIC teaming

[Alexandre Snarskii]

On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 11:30:52AM +1100, Dale Shaw wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm operating in a bit of an information vacuum here, but I'm trying
> to help out some colleagues with a server NIC teaming / EX switch
> problem.

Looks like you're hitting following bug: 

PR/492704 EX switch should forward certain unregistered L2 multicast
packets used by HP NIC teaming

Fixed in 9.3S7.2 for ex-series. 

> 
> The problem as described to me is that some HP servers with teamed
> NICs are having connectivity problems when migrating from Cisco to
> Juniper LAN switches. The teaming mode on the server side is "Network
> Fault Tolerance (NFT)". Theoretically this means only one adapter in
> the team is active at any one time, however there is a heartbeat
> protocol used to detect faults in the switching fabric. The heartbeat
> protocol is based on a Layer 2 multicast -- it is not IP. The source
> MAC is the 'real' adapter's hardware address, and the destination MAC
> is 03-00-C7-00-00-EE.
> 
> The server appears to flip flop between interfaces in the team, which
> indicates to me that something is going wrong with the heartbeat.
> We're about to do some lab work to see what's happening on the wire
> but in the meantime I thought I'd shoot out this e-mail.
> 
> My colleagues connected the server to a Cisco switch which had been
> "write erase, reload"'d, and it just worked.
> 
> Is there anything "special" about the way a Juniper EX switch handles
> non-IP, multicast frames? The EX switch config is really, really
> simple. They've tried turning just about everything off (including
> STP) to no avail.
> 
> Any clues? Did some Googling but came up empty.
> 
> cheers,
> Dale
> BTW: Having said all that about heartbeats, I could be headed down a
> rabbit warren -- if the high level problem description reminds any of
> you of another problem, please set me straight :-)
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