NIC Teaming / Failover with Active/Passive Switching

[rtunisi]

Hello!

I have a question regarding nic teamming setup with active / passive cisco switching.

We have the current setup today: each esx4.1 host have two pnics connected to our cisco catalyst 4506 core as a teamming. Both pnics are configured with 802.1q trunking to enable multiple vlan ids. No issues so far as this setup is pretty simple.

Recently we are implementing a new switch core to function as a failover switch in active/passive layout. I tried to put another 2 pnics on each host (trunking enabled) on the secondary switch as standby cards, so our pretend-to-be setup is much like this:

PortGroups - vSwitches - 2 PNICS on SwitchCoreA (active teamming) - 2 PNICS on SwitchCoreB(Standby teamming)

However this setup brought me an issue. I won switch failover because when switch A goes down, both standby cards gets up on core B and network stands up OK, but i lost NIC failover, since when one active card goes down, ESX tries to put one standby card UP and messes up my entire teamming (nics at CORE B arent disable, the switch stays there at some sort of "passive mode")

i need to know if theres any setup which can make me achieve both NIC and Switch Failover at this setup

any help would be apreciated

Thanks

Rtunisi

[vGuy]

have you looked into Use explicit failover order policy using a single vSwitch. Basically, you should be able to put vmnics from PSwitch1 in active mode and vmnics from PSwitch2 in Standby mode...If both the vmnics of PSwitch1 fail the alive test, the PSwitch2 vmnics will be evaluated for taking over the traffic.

[vogie563]

NIC teaming is designed to keep connections avaliable wether a switch or adapter goes down, etc. I am not sure you will be able to direct NIC traffic based on the type of failure. The vSwitch will not know the difference between the adapter or your primary switch going down, it will just see a link failure and bring up the adapter listed first in "Standby".