vSwitch EtherChannel

[cmowl]

I'm not really a network guy, so bear with me here

We are standing up our ESX Environment and are trying to determine the network configuration for the Virtual Machine traffic. We are attempting to provide maximum bandwidth with a switch failover configuration.

The switches we are using are Cisco Catalyst 2960s, so what our network folks come up with is to take 2 NICs from each ESX Server into 1 of the Catalyst 2960s and configure the ports as an EtherChannel for a 2GBps pipe. We will take a third NIC and plug it into the other Catalyst 2960 as a failover port in the event that the primary switch were to go offline.

I configure a vSwitch on the ESX Server with the 3 physical NICs, the 2 EtherChanneled NICs as Active Adapters, and the third as a Standby Adapter.

Lets say the tests failed miserably. Intermittent connection to the VMs, routing issues. My network guy is telling me it's a problem on the ESX end, and that config might not be possible with VMware. Is this true? Any pointers anyone can lend to me?

[depping]

So you have 2 nics in a channel and one as a standby but not in the channel? If so, that's the problem. When 1 nic fails the the standby nics steps in causing mac-addresses to appear on switchports that the switch would not expect. So don't mix these nics up.

Set the esx vswitch on "IP HASH" teaming by the way!

Duncan

My virtualisation blog:

[cmowl]

We have both NICs in the primary Cisco switch as part of the EtherChannel, and both of these NICs are Active on the vSwitch

The standby NIC is on a completely different Cisco switch. Can you do an EtherChannel between switches? Sorry, I'm not a hardcore network guy - just want to know what my options are in the event of a switch failure

[depping]

Yeah you can if the physical switch supports cross-stack etherchannels. But that depends on the Cisco Switch. It is the best setup in my opinion.

Duncan

My virtualisation blog: