NLB with Catalyst switches

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Hello:

I have recent upgraded my network and deployed Cisco switches with VLAN,
trunking and EtherChannels. After a few days I started experiencing brief
periods where all network traffic would bog down. After performing several
sniffs I was able to determine the problem was my 2 NLB TS servers. Due to
both servers having the same virtual MAC address I am getting unicast
flooding when there is an ARP request for the MAC address of the virtual IP
address assigned to the NLB. Currently my NLB servers are in unicast mode
and I am using 1 NIC. I thought using a second NIC and reconfiguring to
multicast would correct this problem but it does not. The switch flooding
issue still has the potential to reoccur.

I have read over a dozen TechNet articles on configuring NLB but they do not
go into enough detail when it comes to the ARP requests regarding the
virtual MAC and switches. I read a blurg in "Intro MS Windows Server 2003"
which talked about switch flooding and said to place the severs on there own
VLAN. With all the reading I have been doing for best performance I should
use 2 NICs.

Is creating a new VLAN for these servers my best option? Is there something
better? Does anyone know of the best way to reconfigure this for performance
and good TechNet articles?

Harrison Midkiff


.

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