ESX NIC teaming with standby on Cisco VSS Etherchannel Problem

[bosbik]

hi,

i have a problem with my ESX setup.

we have an ESX with 8 NICs. 4 are active and 4 are on standby and they are connected to a Ciso 6500 on VSS. the 4 active are connected on switch one and the other four, which are standby, connected to switch 2.

now my dilemma. i am not sure if putting the 4 ports connected to the active NICs to one etherchannel and the other standby ports on its own will work. from the way i look at it the switch may forward the ports to the standby instead of the active ones since it does not know which one is active and standby unlike the ESX host.

another option is to bundle up all the actvie and standby into one etherchannel but still the problem of the switch forwarding to the wrong port(standby) comes up.

Has ayone run into this situation before?

[a_p_]

Welcome to the Community,

what you are trying to do is not supported. For details on this take a look at http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1004048.

Do not configure standby uplinks with IP HASH load balancing

Btw. as you might know, EtherChannel only balances outgoing traffic, unless you use the Cisco NEXUS 1000V which supports LACP.

André

[bosbik]

Thanks. just as I suspected..what would be a good solution? change active/standby to activ/active?

[afertmann]

Yeah. Config all the nics as active.  For instance, if you have 4 nics on a vswitch, when a VM boots, it binds to one of those nics on the vswitch.  It will use that nic on and only that nic unless there is a failure.  At that time esx will transfer the VMs network stack to a remaining nic on that vswitch.  I never really saw a reason to config standby nics.

Hope this helps!

[a_p_]

I don't know your environment, however in most cases leaving the vSwitch Policy on "Route based on originating port ID" and setting all NICs to active (attached to different switches) should do a good deal of load balancing.

If you have an Enterprise Plus license you could also consider using dVS and configuring the Load based policy which was introduced with version 4.1!?

André