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W0lfZ
Contributor
Contributor

Setting up LACP between 2 ESXI Hosts.

Hello everyone,

This will be my First post ever on the VM Community.

I've been searching but i've found no solution so far.

First things first. I'm a Dutch IT Student researching alot of things for my internship at a security company.

Now of course they won't let me do wicked sick stuff but they do give me a lot of assignments. Wich i've succeeded so far.

But for my next challenge I'm really going to need some help!

Okay here goes. I'm researching how to connect 2 vms hosted on different physical hosts.

The picture below describes briefly what I'm trying to achieve.

ESXI SETUP.png

I've left out my IP Table because i feel like there are alot of problems there to (or maybe im just looking over something really obvious.

So i have a 24 port Cisco SF300 Series Switch. and 2 physical machines.

One is a host with ESXI 6.5 The other runs ESXI 6.7.

Ive connected Host 1 to Gigabit port 1 and 2.

I've connected Host 2 to gigabit port 3 and 4.

Now i know there is a possibility to gain a 2GB Linkspeed and thats exactly what i'm trying to achieve here.

But somehow i'm not able to get it to work.

Can someone PLEASE help me out with a guide or example build? I feel like i'm missing things and I've been working on this for like a week now.

I'm clueless and i really want to learn how to do this. But i'm not really getting the support that i've hoped for.

Please educate me!

"Man is least themself when he talks in his own person, give him a mask and he'll tell you the truth." -Oscar Wilde
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4 Replies
dbalcaraz
Expert
Expert

Hi!

Yes, of course there are ways to do it.
Well, you will have to set up a LACP between ports on each Switch.

Then, you can set up VLANs in different ways: VMware Knowledge Base

Normally people allow all VLANs that they use (meaning not ALL VLANs, only what you need) and let the vSwitch to tag each packet.

After that, you will need to create vSwitch (standard or distributed) and configure it: https://masteringvmware.com/how-to-create-vswitch-step-by-step/

Once you configure it, you will have to let know the hosts that there is a LACP configured, so in the vSwitch you will have to configure the correspondent portgroup: VMware Knowledge Base

This is a quick recap as there are things to discuss inside each point but I hope that can be useful to you.

-------------------------------------------------------- "I greet each challenge with expectation"
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daphnissov
Immortal
Immortal

Let's just back up here and address this per your diagram:

Now i know there is a possibility to gain a 2GB Linkspeed and thats exactly what i'm trying to achieve here.

But somehow i'm not able to get it to work.

In all likelihood, LACP is NOT going to give you this ability. People are often under the wrong impression of how LACP works in that it "sprays" data evenly across any and all bonded links. It doesn't. Especially in your case where you show one VM on each end, you're not going to achieve what you think.

If you're using vCenter Server and licensed for a vDS, the better option is to use LBT on a given port group as this actually takes into consideration bandwidth utilization on the physical link. Note that even this will not give you the throughput you seek with only two VMs communicating, but it's far simpler from an upstream networking perspective because it doesn't require any special configuration. Long story short here: skip trying to use LACP and focus on more valuable things in your testing.

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W0lfZ
Contributor
Contributor

what i meant with linkspeed is ofcourse not throughput.

for example.

When you go to your network status screen in windows you'll have 1Gbit if you have a wired connection. you can make it 2 Gbit by lacp.

In the image below it's 100mbps. but still you can achieve 200mbps the same way.

status.PNG

I know the reason for "Stacking" your internal link speed is purely for load balancing am i right?

Damn i wish there was a tutorial wich explains everything i have to do in 1 thing.

"Man is least themself when he talks in his own person, give him a mask and he'll tell you the truth." -Oscar Wilde
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daphnissov
Immortal
Immortal

When you go to your network status screen in windows you'll have 1Gbit if you have a wired connection. you can make it 2 Gbit by lacp.

In the image below it's 100mbps. but still you can achieve 200mbps the same way.

No, you can't. This isn't how it works. The virtual NIC is going to report the same link speed as one of the vmnics on the ESXi host. LACP has nothing to do with this.

I know the reason for "Stacking" your internal link speed is purely for load balancing am i right?

Also no. Again, however, if you're trying to do this and don't understand these concepts, it's far simpler if you skip LACP and go with the mechanisms provided by vSphere.

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