Hi,
I am in the process of building a new physical backup server, and I would like to team the NIC's in order to double the throughput. I have attempted to configure 2x NIC teams with 2x physical NIC's in each. Team 1 will be for the LAN access for accessing the VM's to backup, and Team 2 will be for the iSCSI network, in order to attach the backup storage directly.
I set the teams up as LACP, and then configured the connected switch with LACP port channels using a Cisco Catalyst 9300 switch on the connected ports. This all seemed to work fine initially, and network performance looked good on both NIC teams. I was able to connect the iSCSI volumes and the local LAN was working properly, so everything looked to be working.
That was until I rebooted. After a reboot, both the iSCSI and the LAN died. The only way I could recover it was to either shut/no shut the port channel, or disable/re-enable the NIC team, or simply change the IPv4 address around. It simply will not recover from a reboot.
Then to add more issues, the connected iSCSI targets became corrupted, and I had to recover the backup targets on another server (VM) using chkdsk /f.
I noticed that when I disabled the iSCSI NIC team after one reboot, the LAN NIC team came up all by itself without any reconfiguration.
My question is - am I doing this right? I've read that iSCSI is supported and I cant seem to find any issues on behaviour like this being normal in Server 2012 R2. I'm putting it down to some kind of bug at the moment, but it might be the way I've set it up. Is an LACP port channel the way to go here?
Thanks :)
