Advance Networking question about SC

[galibai]

Hi,

I wonder, how would the the traffic from the SC go the external network if both the adapters are set on Active/Active and the Load Balancing is - route based on originating port ID.

Few Questions, that cross my mind

1) How would ESX decide which NIC is it going to use? Does it depends on the priority list ?

2) Will ESX server communicate via both the nics ?

3) How about the Physical nics are connected to 2 different Physical switch, how would traffic flow from the ESX to the nics?

Galibai

[weinstein5]

1) The traffic would go out the NIC based upon the virtual port id assigned to the vswif port - so all of the SC traffic will go out a single NIC -using port based load balancing method the vmkernel will select which physical NIC to send traffic out based on the virtual port id of the virtual NIC -

2) It depends if you have other port or port groups connected to that vSwitch - if you do the their traffic will go out the other NIC

3) Each switch will record the virtual MAC addresses of thevirtual NICs - remember aswitch is a layer two device and since the traffic from a virtual NIC will only traverse out a single physical NIC when using port based load balancing the inbound traffic will only come across that physical port

The load balancing method that will simulate the closest to true load balancing is the IP hash load balancing which will cause the vmkernel will choose the physical NIC the traffic will go based on the roriginating IP address and the destination IP address - so traffic can go out all of the physical NICs - this will require the physiocal switch you connect to must support Link Aggregation -

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