Nick Teaming and Port Channel

[bnk]

We have one dvSwitch with one port group for vmotion and one for management trafik.

The dvSwitch have two physical network cards for uplink. Both port groups are NiC Teamed with both cards active, so each port group can use both network cards.

The dvSwitch is connected to a physical switch witch is not using Port Channel.

My question is:

1. When I use Nic Teaming on the dvSwitch, is it a good idea to setup Port Channels on the physical switch to make a true load balancing?

2. Is it possible to setup Port Channel on the physical switch when the esxi server is in production?

[a_p_ · Accepted solution]

Rather than to configure  port channeling (EtherChannel) which is only supported with static "mode on" (no LACP) anyway, you may consider to switch to the "Load Based Teaming (LBT)" policy. For vMotion and Management however - as in your question - I would go ahead and configure both port groups as active/standby, so each of them uses its dedicated uplink and only failover to a single uplink in case of a link failure.

André

[bnk]

Hi A.P.

Thanks for your answer.

Why is it better to use active/standby instead of active/active?

[a_p_]

Both NICs/uplinks will be active in this case. What you basically do is to configure the Management port group to use uplink1 (active) and uplink2 (standby) and for vMotion it's the other way around - uplink1 (standby) and uplink2 (active). This way Management as well as vMotion use dedicated uplinks and still have redundancy with the standby uplink.

André

[bnk]

But if I use active/active, I will gain more bandwidth.

Is that not worth considering?

[a_p_]

Actually you will not, unless you consider to configure Multi-NIC vMotion. As mentioned earlier, LACP is not an option for ESXi.

André