User Manual

18 CHAPTER 3: INSTALLING AND CONFIGURING IN WINDOWS
■ Decide which NICs are to be part of each group. Each group must
include at least two NICs.
■ Decide whether you want to use a foreign NIC in one of the groups.
Two foreign NICs (two that are not 3Com EtherLink Server NICs) are allowed in
one group per server.
■ Decide which NIC is to be the primary NIC in each group.
■ You can specify failover from a Gigabit NIC to a 10/100 NIC. To ensure optimal
performance, this type of failover requires that you disable load balancing for
the group.
■ For the best failover performance, turn the spanning tree feature off at
switches that are connected directly to the server. If the spanning tree feature is
turned on, a failover may be delayed up to 30 seconds while the switch
processes the spanning tree algorithm.
■ Plan the cable changes required to connect each primary NIC and all secondary
NICs to the same network segment.
■ Observe the recommended support limit of four groups per server.
■ The following guidelines apply to groups under Windows 2000:
802.1p Support Property—The value of the Windows 2000 802.1p Support
property must be the same for all NICs in a group. For example, if this property
is enabled for the primary NIC, it must also be enabled for all other NICs in the
group.
Microsoft Task Offload Support—It is possible to form a group of NICs that
have different levels of support for Microsoft Task Offload features (TCP
Checksum, TCP Segmentation, and IP Sec). In this case, the offload support is
limited to the features supported by all NICs in the group. For example, if two
NICs in a group support all offload features but one NIC supports only TCP
Checksum, then offload support for the group is limited to TCP Checksum.
■ Observe these VLAN configuration guidelines:
■ Assign a VLAN ID number to each VLAN. If you are not using a DHCP server,
each VLAN that is using IP services requires an IP address and subnet mask.
■ DynamicAccess software supports as many as 16 VLANs per server.
■ Each VLAN bound to TCP/IP must exist on a separate IP subnet. DHCP
servers used to allocate IP addresses must be located on the same IP subnets
as the VLANs.
■ Each VLAN bound to the IPX/SPX protocol must use a unique network
number.
■ Under Windows 2000, when VLANs are enabled, the Windows 2000
802.1p Support property must be disabled for all the underlying miniports.
■ A minimum of 128Mb of RAM is required for multiple VLAN configurations
(up to a maximum of 16 VLANs). You can improve overall system
performance with VLANs by increasing the physical RAM, the virtual
memory page size, or both.