Windows 2012 R2 Hyper-V Cluster NIC Teaming Qlogic 10GB NIC Virtual switch BSOD

Fred Blum 1 Reputation point
2020-07-16T09:31:57.263+00:00

We are using 3x DL380 G7 with Windows 2012 R2 Hyper-V Cluster. In order to get more performance out of it we added 2 HPE NC523sfp 2P 10GB NICS per host. The ISCSI traffic worked as a charm.

So we had a consultant in to try and use the 2 remaining free 10GB port to improve LAN and Cluster speed.

The HP Switch stack is configured to use LACP. Host1 paused, removed the 1GB NICS from the LAN Team and replaced them with the 10GB NICS. He tried to make the virtual switch converged so it would be used for VM traffic, management and cluster traffic. Everythings seems to go smooth, no errors and no restart needed. After resuming VM's were live migrated without problems.
So he started on host2 paused. After resuming and life migrating VM's, Host1 suddenly BSOD with stopcode 133 PDC watchdog violation error. The driver is the latest HPE november 2015 driver for this QLogic NIC.

He removed the VLAN tag and virtual switch configuration so it would only be used for VM LAN traffic. This time it remained stable so also Host3 was done. Life Migrating, pausing and resuming and the nightly backup of the VM's went without problems.

Yesterday I installed the July update and host3 started to BSOD under normal VM workload. I paused it to investigate further and this night also Host1 and Host2 went BSOD under the VEEAM VM backup.

I have read that there are VMQ issues with these older NICS , NIC teaming due to overlapping processors. According to the consultant that only relates to switch independent teaming. We use LACP and load balancing mode is set to hashtag instead of dynamic.

I have for now disabled VMQ on the NIC team and NICS.

Are there know VMQ issues with these older NICS, W2012R2 Hyper-V Host and W2008R2 VM's also when using LACP?

TIA,

Fred

Windows Server 2012
Windows Server 2012
A Microsoft server operating system that supports enterprise-level management, data storage, applications, and communications.
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Hyper-V
Hyper-V
A Windows technology providing a hypervisor-based virtualization solution enabling customers to consolidate workloads onto a single server.
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  1. Xiaowei He 9,871 Reputation points
    2020-07-17T08:19:24.927+00:00

    Hi,

    After some research, I found some similar case talking about BSOD with VMQ on Server 2012R2, below are the links for your reference:
    https://www.miru.ch/bsod-on-hyper-v-2012-r2-cluster-nodes-after-installing-kb2887595/

    https://www.experts-exchange.com/questions/28552775/BSOD-on-Hyper-V-2012-R2-Cluster-Node-related-to-VMQ.html

    NOte: the content include third-party links, since it will change its content without notification, we do not guarantee its security.

    However, if you want to learn the detailed information about the BSOD, it's recommended to turn open a case with MS to do BSOD dump anlaysis:
    Link to open MS case:
    https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4051701/global-customer-service-phone-numbers
    Best Regards,
    Anne

  2. Alex Bykovskyi 1,831 Reputation points
    2020-07-26T21:43:19.347+00:00

    Hey,

    Just a tiny thing to add (since disabling VMQ helped resolving your issue), to improve your iSCSI performance you can disable LACP on your NICs and use MPIO instead. The following comparison will show you more: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/blog/lacp-vs-mpio-on-windows-platform-which-one-is-better-in-terms-of-redundancy-and-speed-in-this-case-2#:~:text=Both%20are%20aimed%20at%20providing,support%20more%20than%20one%20connection.

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