Esxi 7,3 networking multiple connections same lan switch

[Tmesias]

What are we essentially doing if we connect multiple connections from an esxi host to the same lan switch without using any link aggregation protocol?  Are we using spanning tree on the vswitch to block ports?  Is that per vlan?

[scott28tt]

This would be a good read: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1004088

[Tibmeister]

Not really using STP, but you can have a lot of ARP reflection and duplication of packets if you have the same VLAN going over multiple interfaces without some type of aggregation protocol running.  If you don't want to run an aggregation protocol, you would need to only have a single link as Active and the rest as Standby to act as failover.  You can do this on a per-PortGroup/VLAN basis, so you can have multiple VLANs, each going over their own link, to manually balance out the bandwidth consumption of the links.

[a_p_]

If you go with the default Teaming&Failover setting "Route Based on Originating Virtual Port" then there's basically nothing that you have to take care of. With this setting a VM gets an uplink (vmnic) assigned at power on, and only fail over to another one in case of a connection loss.

Make sure that the physical switch ports do not have STP enabled (you may of course configure e.g. RSTP though), so that a connection, or failover works seamlessly.

André

[Tibmeister]

I've seen a lot of ARP duplication when in this default state.