Use case of Explicit Failover Policy Over Active/Standby Configuration

[RanjnaAggarwal]

Anyone who can tell me why we should select explicit failover policy over active/standby configuation. is there any benefit of selecting the explicit failover policy?

[rcporto]

You can distribute differents types of traffic between Active and Standy NICs, for example, put NIC1 Active for vMotion and NIC2 Standby and put NIC2 Active for FT and NIC1 Standy... and in case of failure of NIC failure, the Standby will be use... this way do you will have high availability and one type of traffic will not make another type of traffic unavailable due to bandwith utilization.

[RanjnaAggarwal]

but what is benefit of explicit failover policy?

[rcporto]

You can check some more examples on this paper: http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/vsphere-distributed-switch-best-practices.pdf

[RanjnaAggarwal]

but i want to know the use case of explicit failover and still that is not clear to me with this diagram?

[a_p_ · Accepted solution]

An interesting question. I assume a customer had a special requirement for this and it was added for that purpose. However, I really cannot think of a use case where I would prefer this setting over an Active/Standby configuration. The conclusion in the http://kensvirtualreality.wordpress.com/2009/04/05/the-great-vswitch-debate%E2%80%93part-3/ for this setting is:

This is another policy that I file in the “interesting but worthless” category.

André

[RanjnaAggarwal]

Thanks Andre