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miyo360
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Equivalent LACP for standard vSwitch?

[3 hosts, ESXi 5.1]

Hi,

After reading up extensively about LACP and configuration of the distributed switch, I attempted to migrate my 4 standard switches to distributed, only to find out we are not licensed for Enterprise Plus. We only have Enterprise licenses. While I consider the other benefits of upgrading, I would like to explore my options with the standard switches.

Can I simply go to the switch, click the NIC teaming tab and put all my nics in the active adapters section and assume I am getting improved performance and redundancy? What should I choose in the Load Balancing and Failover Detection drop-downs?

Thanks in advance.

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weinstein5
Immortal
Immortal

Welcome to the Community - to distribute the network traffic across the physical NICs you will want to select Routes based on IP Hash - this will select the outgoing NIC based on the originating and destination IP addresses - so you can see if a VM is only communicating to a single IP address that its traffic will only go out a single physical NIC -

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tomtom901
Commander
Commander

Be sure to configure the physical switch accordingly then. Loadbalancing based on IP hash requires (in Cisco terms) Port-Channels set up. If you just want basic load balancing, keep the default of "By originating Port ID". Loadbalancing by IP hash is better, but as I mentioned, requires physical switch config.

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miyo360
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Thanks both, very helpful. Our switches are pretty low end. We are running our vm production traffic to Netgear GS724TS switches and our iSCSI traffic to HP Procurve 1800-24G.

Don't suppose you know what the equivalent terminology is for Cisco's Port-Channels on HP and Netgear?

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tomtom901
Commander
Commander

I thought it was LAG but with such low end switches I'd advise against a LAG and let ESXi do loadbalancing by port ID. Just move the vmnic adapters to the active adapters heading.

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