A few weeks ago, I was banging my head on the table trying to get the management port group working on a nic team/etherchannel for a client.  They use Netgear switches, so I was kinda feeling my way through the GUI to make it work.  Everything looked right, but I still couldn’t get the stupid etherchannel working.  Everytime I plugged both nics in on the 2 nic channel, the link would drop.  It would come right back up when I removed one of the links.  I got fed up and blamed the switches.

Normally when you create an etherchannel you also go into the vswitch properties and enable “Route based IP hash” for the load balancing algorithm.  As it turns out, THE MANAGEMENT NETWORK PORT GROUP DOES NOT INHERIT THIS SETTING IN 4.1.  I followed the instructions tonight and the etherchannel works like a champ now (again?) at the client site.

%#$@%#$!!!