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lacp without vcenter's webportal

Hi experts

I am trying to configure LACP on a esxi 5.5 host. But all the guide keeps talking about using the web client and that seems to come only with the vcenter. which I don't have. Does anyone have either the CLI version of the cmds needed or a way to just use the vsphere client?

thanks guys

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JPM300
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Without vCenter and Distributed Switches you can't do full LACP.  However you can still do an IP hash on your vSwitch setup and create a LAG group on your ESXi hosts in that vSwitch.  You are however limited to the IP hash in this case as far as load balancing / performance goes which really only gives you any benifits when you have a VM with really large / active NIC requirments.


If you have any questinos pelase let us know,

Hope this has helped

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vfk
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Unfortunately you can only create lacp when you have vCenter server, also lacp require distributes vswitch which is only available on the enterprise plus license.  Also, all new features are only available through the web client the C# client is getting phased out.

--- If you found this or any other answer helpful, please consider the use of the Helpful or Correct buttons to award points. vfk Systems Manager / Technical Architect VCP5-DCV, VCAP5-DCA, vExpert, ITILv3, CCNA, MCP
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I can't do it even with powercli?

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JPM300
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Without vCenter and Distributed Switches you can't do full LACP.  However you can still do an IP hash on your vSwitch setup and create a LAG group on your ESXi hosts in that vSwitch.  You are however limited to the IP hash in this case as far as load balancing / performance goes which really only gives you any benifits when you have a VM with really large / active NIC requirments.


If you have any questinos pelase let us know,

Hope this has helped

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vfk
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Good point JPM300, yes you can certainly use IP Hash which is static LAG, but anything other than IP Hash requires vDS and can only be configured in web portal, as all new features only available in the web client.

--- If you found this or any other answer helpful, please consider the use of the Helpful or Correct buttons to award points. vfk Systems Manager / Technical Architect VCP5-DCV, VCAP5-DCA, vExpert, ITILv3, CCNA, MCP
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hi guys

thanks for all your reply. its a been a great help.

what is the advantage or disadvantage between LACP and LAG?

I know that with LACP we can automatically do trunking without manual config. What about performance wise? I got 2X 10G Fiber connections to my VM so I have quite the large NIC requirement.

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JPM300
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The LACP you get with vCenter 5.5 and VDS has better IP hash's or more of them so it allows you to do better load balacncing.  It also creates a dynamic LACP connection like it would if you where going from switch to switch as one side will be active, while the other side is passive.

The LAG with IP hash without vCenter will essentially do round robin.  When a communication is started it will pick 1 path our of the LAG group and use that path exclusively based on the IP hash.  Where this can slightly benifit you instead of using Orig Port ID without any LAG is with Orig Port ID it does round robin without any knowledge of weather a connection is saturated.  Meaning if you where using 1GB connections instead and say you had 2, it would just round robin between the two.  However lets say out of your 10VM's by chance of the round robin all 5 of the heavy NIC requirement VM's landed on vmnic0, instead of  vmnic1.  You could have network issues.  With the LAG the IP hash would eliminate this slightly for you, which is waht I ment by it can sometime benifit on large VM's that have large NIC requirements.  Snce you are using 10GB nic's I don't think you have much to worry about.

With 10GB nics a LAG with IP hash would just probably add a slightly quickly failover to the other nic then Orig ID as its unlikely your VM will saturate a 10GB nic, but if your VM is doing that then you could look into setting up the LAG.  Otherwise its usally not worth the hassle and just stick with Orig ID.

If you have any other questions please let us know,

Hope this has helped

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awesome explanation! thank you very much.

I just have one more question: people keep talking about configuring the LAG group. That is the same thing as NIC Teaming right? I went into NIC teaming menu and configured my two NICs to use IP hash. Is that what you guys mean by making the LAG group? I don't see anything that explicitly says "make a LAG group" so I just want to double check.

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JPM300
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The NIC teaming in the VI client is just very basic NIC teaming and it defaults to orginal port ID.  If you want to use lag change your teaming from Original Port ID (AKA round robin) to IP hash.  Then on the switch side of things you need to have a LAG setup for the connections to the switch.  Without vCenter/VDS the LAG is souly controlled on the switches end and you just tell the team for the vswitch/port group to use IP hash.

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vfk
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This comes down to traffic profile right, who is communicating with who and what direction, else the the additional complexity of LAG is not worth it, you are better off using LBT & NOIC.

--- If you found this or any other answer helpful, please consider the use of the Helpful or Correct buttons to award points. vfk Systems Manager / Technical Architect VCP5-DCV, VCAP5-DCA, vExpert, ITILv3, CCNA, MCP
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