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EricFlag for United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

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WLAN Microsoft NLB Conundrum

Good afternoon All

Situation:
I have 2 subnets x.x.32.x and x.x.35.x with a wlan in between, on the 35.x end I have a Dell 6224 and on the 32.x end I have a HP 3400cl.  I have a web host on the 35.x and a 2 x wcf apps server on the 32.x with MS load balancing - the web host needs to connect to the 32.x wcf servers.  Both ends are VMs on VMware hosts.

Problem:
The web host can connect to the wcf if it used the NIC IP but is unable to connect to the NLB IP.  

On the Dell switch I can add static ARP entries but on the HP switch I only have the option of Proxy-ARP (unless someone knows different).
I cam across an option of adding a second NIC to the pair of WCF servers and altering the vSwitch but that will only work if I keep both servers on a single host, which sort of negates the reason for having them on separate hosts.

Could anyone give me a suggestion on how to achieve this connection without compromising my network or breaking anything else.?

Many thanks
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asavener
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What's the network topology at the 32.x site?  It's the layer 3 device that I'm concerned about.
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ASKER

Hi Asavener

The layer 3 device we use for routing is the HP3400cl - it routes the traffic through the Huawei to the 35.x site.

Thanks
So that's the device that won't let you add a static ARP entry for the NLB address?
OK, according to the documentation for that model switch, it should support static ARP entries, but they only get added to the ARP table when the interface comes up:


ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/networking/software/6400-5300-4200-3400-AdvTrafficMgmt-Oct2006-59906051-Chap11.pdf

A static entry enters the ARP cache from the static ARP table (which is a separate table) when the interface for the entry comes up
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ASKER

Hi Asavener

There is no way to add static entries, and the dynamic entry only seems to pick up the host IP and mac not the load balancing IP and mac - in IPConfig it shows the nic as having 2 IP addresses not a real card and a NLB virtual card.  The wcf apps servers are virtual machines so they are not connected directly to the HP3400.
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asavener
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Many thanks for you help with this asavener, the links you supplied were very useful.