Aidan Finn, IT Pro

My lesson from the lab is this …  If you are implementing WS2012 Hyper-V hosts with converged fabrics then you need to realise that all of your NICs for RDP access will be committed to the NIC team and Hyper-V switch.  That means that while implementing or troubleshooting the switch and converged fabrics you will need some alternative to RDP/Remote Desktop.  And I’m not talking VNC/TeamViewer/etc.

In my lab, I have LOTS of spare NICs.  That won’t be true of field implementation.  I temporarily fired up an “RDP” NIC, configure my team, switch, and a virtual NIC for the Parent.  Then I RDPd into the Parent virtual NIC and disabled the “RDP” NIC.

In the field, I strongly advise using the baseboard management controller (BMC) to remotely log into the host while implementing, re-configuring or troubleshooting the converged fabrics setup.  Why?  Because you’ll be constantly interrupted if relying on RDP into one of the converged or virtual NICs.  You may even find NICs switching from static to DHCP addressing and it’ll take time to figure out what their new IPs are.

You’ll be saving money by converging fabrics.  Go ahead and cough up the few extra quid to get a BMC such as Dell DRAC or HP iLO fully configured and onto the network so you can reliably log into the server.  Plus it gives you other features like power control, remote OS installation, and so on.

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