Hi:

I was wondering if anyone has installed Server 2008 and Hyper-V on a PowerEdge 2950 with Dual Broadcom NICs and a DRAC (or on a similar setup). I will be using this setup and have found several NIC configurations that work, but I was wondering if anyone had specific instructions on configuring the NICs for optimal performance. First let me warn you – my talents, if any, are not in the realm of DNS or NIC setup and optimization, so any help would be appreciated.

For example, questions I have at this point include:

1. Should I put both hardware NICs into the initial Hyper-V VLAN built during the Hyper-V install, or should I only put one hardware NIC in this initial VLAN? Or, should I have two Hyper-V VLANs and put one hardware NIC in each?

2. I got NIC teaming to work by building the team in the parent Server 2008 session after I had Hyper-V installed and several VMs created, but performance leaves something to be desired (and I have seen some odd DNS issues) - has anyone had any success with NIC teaming?

3. Setting static IPs for my VMs is simple enough, even for me, but what type of IPs work best for the hardware NICs (or the NIC Team, if applicable) at the parent session level? If I leave both NICs in the parent session DHCP, DNS shows two entries for the parent server – is this an issue? Should I set one, or both, two static IPs? If I set both to static IPs, will this cause issues in DNS? Finally, if NIC teaming can be used, should I use a static or DHCP IP for the team?


Finally, on my current test setup with NIC teaming active using a static IP for the team, my DRAC is suddenly inaccessible over the network. I can PING it successfully, but I cannot browse to it anymore. Has anyone gotten a DRAC to work when NIC teaming is setup under Server 2008?

Sincerely,
Mike