Practical Technology

I would preface this with the fact that I am not able (do not want) to reproduce the issue, but after discussions with our very experienced network guy (20 yrs) and another senior analyst, this is what we came up with. Further, this could just be due to an old version of OpenE, or issues with our old switch stack.  If you would like to discuss otherwise, I am happy to hear from the experts. TL;DR: If you have a 'whitebox' SAN that uses the Linux bonding driver in ALB mode, DO NOT make any kind of L2 changes on the SAN switch without shutting everything down first.  Also, patch your ESXi like ASAP. We have an old legacy SAN (OpenE), it has two NICs that each connect to our old Netgear switch stack (one per switch).  Up until now, no issues with the unit.  Earlier this week I was adding a LAG to the switch stack as part of our new SAN deployment - the LAG did not utilize any active ports, and for a few hours seemed to be functioning just fine. Then I get a...

I should note that I am posting this because a number of large companies/providers did not have any sort of clear answer for us on this, and in some cases had incorrect recommendations.  Hopefully this helps you - if anything in this post is incorrect, PLEASE comment below with your sources. Initially We went back and forth for months on this...are you SURE we need Enterprise?  Cuz Enterprise is super duper expensive (STD=10k, ENT=75k) compared to Standard. Up until now our answer has been "Yes, you need it because Enterprise is the only version that supports clustering, and our application must have HA capabilities."  Semi-wrong!  Microsoft recommends against clustering BizTalk hosts, unless you have a technical reason for it (some adapters require clustering).  They actually recommend the 'scale out' method (moar servars!), and here is how that is done.  Note the sub-points (a,b,c) are direct quotes from MSDN. BizTalk's 3 main functions 1. Recei...