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CZhale
Asked: 2011-02-18 11:33:11 +0800 CST

Hyper-V networking....still not sure which way to go?

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We have our Hyper-V server up and running (Windows 2008 ENT SP2) and started to create some of our VMs. The server has 4 total nics. 2 onboard Broadcom 1gb nic cards and a pci dual port Intel Pro cards 1gb. Right now, I have setup 1 broadcom nic to be the hyper-v host nic, and setup the other broadcom nic for the VMs. We are not using the Intel Nics....should we be thinking about teaming?Link Aggregation??

I just want to achieve the best possible setup for the network, but have read many things for and against teaming the nics??

Thoughts?

networking hyper-v network-teaming

2 Answers

  1. I would team one broadcom and one intel nic together, link aggregation is fine and will give you more throughput. This will also get you redundancy across the network controllers. I'd team the the adapters you're going to use for the VMs connections to the network. Ideally you'd team the other connections as well for failover/redudancy.

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  2. Broadcom network cards are a disaster. We first noticed this in 2007, after Windows Server 2003 SP2 was released. We had so many issues, we eventually had to ban Broadcom network cards, and replace Broadcom network cards in every server. Total cost: over $200,000.

    Here is one of the more recent victims:

    http://blog.serverfault.com/post/broadcom-die-mutha/

    If you are expecting support from Microsoft, you should be prepared to dissolve the team and operate on a single network card if there are any issues that need to be investigated. I would also not team the network cards for performance reasons, but for availability reasons.

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