Secondary network question for service console

[thecoffeeguy]

A quick question to see if what I am attempting is feasible.

Have a couple of 6850's that I am working on right now. All have dual onboard nics, and I have installed a Intel Quad NIC.

I setup two vswitches.

First vswitch has: (one NIC from onboard, one from Quad)

--service console

--vmkernel

Second vswitch has all, but one NIC from the quad, configured for virtual machines.

Now, I was thinking of taking the remaining NIC leftover and putting it into my backup network. This would require me to create a second service console.

Since my backup network is completely different from my production network (from IP addressing standpoint), how would that play out when I am putting in the default gateway for the second service console?

For example:

Production network: 10.0.0.1/24

Backup network: 192.168.58.1/24

Prod network gateway: 10.0.0.1

Backup network gateway: 192.168.58.1

When I am configuring the second service console, it automatically fills in the gateway for the production network. Is it safe to change that gateway and have it ONLY affect the specific nic I am configuring?

I appreciate the help.

TCG

[Dave_Mishchenko]

You can just have one SC gateway and that's why it is filled in for you. You can just leave the GW as is.

[oreeh]

A system only can have one default GW.

Configure the second connection and use the automatically filled in - and simply ignore it in the future.

[thecoffeeguy]

Hmm...im getting an error when I try and configure this last NIC for my backup network:

"Error during the configuration of the host: Unable to Create Service Console VNIC vswif1: Exec of command '/sbin/ifup vswif1' succeeded, but returned iwth non-zero status:1'

Googlinge as I post this.

Thanks for the help.

TCG

[vek1]

I ran into that same issue. I figured out that I can create the second service console no problem if I create it on the same network address space as the first service console. e.g if service console 1 is 10.0.0.40 I'd make sc2 on 10.0.0.41 - it doesn't matter what the last octet is (as long as it doesn't conflict) because you'll be editing the config immediately after you make it to set it to the proper ip address.

Seems to work fine, I can see and manipulate my iscsi storage no problem, and I got no error messages.

Good Luck,

Ginny Keller

[jt30605]

If you want to use the 2nd SC connection for HA redundancy, then don't create the 2nd SC on the same subnet as the main one. Here are some intersting articles about this:

[vek1]

Oh - I'm not suggesting you create it on the same network - that is just how you get around the error he mentioned in the post previous to mine. You change to the subnet you want to use after you get it to install.

[jt30605]

Ah, gotcha. I missed that.