Hyper-V & NLB

• Monday, May 17, 2010 1:43 PM

   

   
  

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  I am running Hyper-V R2 on two HP bl460 G6 Blade Servers which are part of a CSV Cluster. I installed two new 2003 x32 SP2 VMs, one per server, with intention of creating a simple Web NLB Cluster (using IIS). Here is what I did:

  • I added two NICs per each VM (although they are part of the same subnet and using the same Virtual Network Adapter I created via the Hyper-V Virtual Network Manager.
  • I did not add any gateway or DNS settings on the NLB NICs.
  • I pushed the "LAN NIC" to be before the NLB NIC in the Advanced Settings property of the Network Connections MMC.
  • I manually configured the NLB MAC Address on the VM Configuration and checked the box to allow spoofing.

  What I started to find was that:

  • All hosts were able to ping the NLB IP, as well as each individual server IP.
  • All hosts could connect to port 80 (http) and view web server content using the direct IP of each host.
  • Some hosts could not connect to port 80 on the NLB IP address. I tried telnet NLBIP 80 and got a timeout.
  • This behavior was inconsistent, with hosts experiencing or not, different subnets, different OSs, etc.

  Then, I opened up a sniffer (WireShark) on my PC (which wasn't working) and on the VM and on the Hyper-V physical server:

  • I saw packets leaving my PC on destination to the NLB IP for port 80 (http)
  • I saw packets arriving at my Hyper-V server (physical), with source IP my PC and destination IP the NLB IP.
  • Nothing coming in seen on the VM.
  • I did however see ping packets come through to the VM and back to my PC.

  I tried a whole bunch of configuration games, different settings, allowing all ports on NLB (not just TCP 80), etc. I don't understand why ping packets are passing through but not TCP 80. I also tried other ports like TCP 3389 (RDP) and also got nowhere. I seem to think there is a problem somewhere with Hyper-V or my physical server.

  Some configs of my physical server:

  • I am using HP Teaming in order to create a bonded NIC of high throughput for a Virtual NIC used by Hyper-V
  • I have updated my server with the latest firmware and drivers as of the beginning of May 2010
  • As far as I know, I have installed all of the latest applicable bug fixes/patches that relate to Hyper-V and 2008 R2.

  Any idea what is going on here and what I can do to get it working? Is there a way to "snif" the Virtual Switch to see if it is passing packets on to the VM or not?

  Thanks,
  Reuv