question about etherchannel with two switches

[EshuunDara]

Trying to figure something out and wanted to get some input from the community. I've got two gigabit ethernet switches but they do not support cross-stack etherchannel. I've got a handful of ESX servers, each with two 2-port NICs. I'm trying to decide how to hook up the ESX servers:

1) two vSwitches with two ports configured in etherchannel to the first switch, and two ports configured in etherchannel to the second swtich. Each VM would be configured to have two nics, one connected to each vSwitch. The two virtual NICs would then be bridged and given the same IP address.

2) two ports to the first switch, two ports to the second switch and not use etherchannel at all.

Can anyone give me pros/cons of either approach? Unfortunately, upgrading to better switches with cross-stack ether channel is not an option.

[weinstein5]

I would configure your vswitches with 2 vmnics one form each NIC card so if you lose the card you will still have connectivity - with etherchannel configured on each switch - also make sure that you configure the load balancing on the vswitch that to IP Based - to take advantage of the etherchannel configuration -

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[thakala]

You don't need fancy network failover configuration inside a VM to gain network resiliency, single vNIC is fine.

VMs connect to virtual switch in ESX, virtual switch has as many uplinks to physical infrastructure as you configure, etherchannel is not required. In case of any of uplinks lose connectivity virtual switch will failover traffic to other uplink and full network access is restored.

So option 2) is the right one.

[thakala]

ESX 4.1 distributed virtual switch has new, load based teaming option http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1022590

I would go for that

[EshuunDara]

My understanding was that you can configure teaming & load balancing in ESX, but those features only affect outbound traffic, not inbound. To do inbound I need to use etherchannel -- is that not the case with dvSwitches? I figure I can set up network resilency with any of these options; I'm trying to figure out what would give me the best performance.

[EshuunDara]

Looked into the dvSwitch option; Can't use that feature unless you have the Enterprise Plus licenses, and I'm stuck with Enterprise.

[DSTAVERT]

Looked into the dvSwitch option; Can't use that feature unless you have the Enterprise Plus licenses, and I'm stuck with Enterprise.

You aren't "stuck" with Enterprise. VMware does have an upgrade path.

[EshuunDara]

lol. There is an upgrade path, however there is nothing in the budget to

support actually upgrading.