Ethernet Products
Determine ramifications of Intel® Ethernet products and technologies
4813 Discussions

S5520HC and Windows Network Load Balancing

idata
Employee
2,082 Views

I've two new servers, each with Intel Hanlan Creek S5520 server board and Intel 82575EB Gigabit NICs and the latest drivers (v11.11.43.0).

I've installed Windows Server 2008 R2 and would like to load balance both machines using Microsoft Network Load Balancing.

Using the Windows Network Load Balancing Manager I ran the 'new cluster' wizard and tried to setup a new cluster in unicast mode. The operation failed with the following Event ID 53:

NLB cluster [192.168.xxx.xxx]: NLB will not attach to adapter '{DF7D858F-369C-4B4B-9EF7-947B343E78DA}' because it does not support dynamic changing of its MAC address. Replace the network adapter with one which supports that capability.

Is there a possibility to get this working (except replacing with another adapter) in unicast mode?

0 Kudos
4 Replies
Edward_Z_Intel
Employee
1,142 Views

You can use Advanced Network Services (ANS) to configure load balancing. See http://www.intel.com/support/network/sb/cs-009747.htm http://www.intel.com/support/network/sb/cs-009747.htm.

0 Kudos
idata
Employee
1,142 Views

Thanks for your answer.

As I understand the Advanced Network Services (ANS) are primarily about adapter TEAMING and load balancing of multiple adapters at the SAME server. My question was referring to Microsoft Network Load Balancing that provides load balancing of two or more servers.

0 Kudos
idata
Employee
1,142 Views

To get to the point: Is it true, that the Intel 82575EB does not support dynamically changing of its MAC address? Is there anybody who got this adapter working in NLB unicast mode?

0 Kudos
idata
Employee
1,142 Views

Finally I uninstalled the Intel drivers and used the Microsoft drivers that came with Windows Server 2008 R2. Now it works and I successfully set up the NLB cluster.

0 Kudos
Reply