lacp portchannel and load balancing policy

[tdubb123]

how is your pair of vmnics configured? is it in lacp or vpc?

if so do you have it set at IP hash or virtual port id?

what policy do you have set for your management nics assuming you have lacp or vpc

vmotion?

iscsi

VM traffic?

thanks

[HendersonD]

Are you using regular switches or distributed switches?

For iSCSI, use port binding

http://buildvirtual.net/configuring-software-iscsi-port-binding-on-esxi-5/

If you are using distributed switches, use route based on nic load and get rid of any port-channel. Use this for VM Traffic

vSwitch Load Balancing Policies Best Practises

For vMotion, you can do multipath vMotion so it takes advantage of both paths

http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2011/09/17/multiple-nic-vmotion-in-vsphere-5/

If the same physical connection is carrying vMotion, iSCSI, and VMTraffic, you will want to use NIOC to limit how much bandwidth that vMotion chews up. If you need to do vMotion during business hours and do not use NIOC, you can bring your production network to its knees

Designing your vMotion network – Multi-NIC vMotion and NetIOC - frankdenneman.nl

[tdubb123]

hi

looks like none of these require lap configuration of the cisco switch. What if I want to configure a lacp port channel on the switch, what policy should i use on the vmware side?

Also does it matter if i use standard switch or dvswitch in a lacp port channel or not?

Would lacp work only on Vm traffic and management traffic? I heard iscsi an vmotion traffic can only utilize one link at a time

[HendersonD]

To help you a bit more we need whether you are using vSwitches or dvSwitches

Also whether you are using 1 gig or 10 gig connections

In my case, I am using two 10 gig connections and two 1 gig connections. The 1 gig connections use a vSwitch and are just for Management. The two 10 gig connections carry vMotion, iSCSI, and VM traffic. I use iSCSI port binding for storage traffic, route based on nic load for VMs, and multipath vMotion. I have in place NIOC so the vMotion traffic does not overwhelm the two nics and slow down VM or iSCSI traffic. We use a separate non-routable vlan for vMotion and another separate non-routable vlan for iSCSI. If you 10 gig nics and the proper licensing in place to take advantage of all of these features, this is the way to go. I would avoid port-channel/lacp since in many cases they really do not give much load balancing where iSCSI port binding distributes the load evenly as well as route base on nic load as well as iSCSI port binding