NIC Teaming for ESX Console and VMotion

[cef2lion]

Our our Dell 2950s. I setup the ESX console and VMotion to share two NICs. I have the console setup on NIC0 and VMotion on NIC2. I'm using separate vlans for the console and VMotion. The console and VMotion have the other NIC setup as standby. The NICs are not on the same network card. This setup is working but I have a question. The NICs are connnected to a Cisco 3750gig switch. I have the switch ports on the 3750 in a etherchannel.

Since the console and VMotion can only ever use one NIC at a time should I even be using an etherchannel on the 3750?

Craig

[mvoss18]

If you're using VLAN tagging with an etherchannel pair then you should be able to set both NICs as active on the vSwitch level.

Here is a good explanation from oschistad regarding etherchannel:

The IP hash algorithm, uses a hash of the source and destination IP to select which physical NIC to send a given packet

through. For a single VM communicating with multiple servers this will enable that VM to drive more than one physical NIC, However each session

is limited to the capacity of one NIC because every packet between two specific nodes will always have the same hashand thus always hit the same physical NIC.

IP hash introduces a lot more complexity and switch management, and will still limit you to a single gigabit interface per session - the

only way to drive more than one gigabit per VM is in those cases where there are multiple high-bandwitch connections going on with different

remote clients (or servers).

[cef2lion]

I understand that I can have both NICs as active. It actually setup that way initially. I thought I would protect the console by only allowing VMotion traffic to use the console NIC if the VMotion NIC was down. This also allows the console to use the VMotion NIC if its NIC was down. That way VMotion can't saturate the console and gives two paths to the console.

My virtual servers share two NICs that are both active. The first 4 2950s we got had 4 NICs. The last 2 2950s were ordered with 6 NICs.

Craig

[mvoss18]

If you want to separate physical traffic between the SC and VMotion then there is no need to do etherchannel. For the SC port group set one of the adapters as active and the other as standby. Then do the same with the VMotion port group.

[cef2lion]

After setting up the console and VMotion network and looking at I thought why would I need an etherchannel given I was using active/standby. I plan to remove the etherchannel from the config.

On load balancing. Is there a better choice then IP Hash? The default and I don't recall what it was on the pull down didn't work at all with he Cisco 3750s. I would like to use the best load balance for our vms which have NICs all in an active state.

Craig

[AndreTheGiant]

Is there a better choice then IP Hash?

The default one (based on port-id) usually works fine.

Andre

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[depping]

There's no need for load balancing the VMkernel or the Service Console. I always set this up with an active / standby situation. In other words:

vswitch0 - vmnic0 + vmnic2

2 portgroups: Service Console + VMkernel

Open the porgroup properties for Service Console and set vmnic0 to active and vmnic2 to standy

Now open the portgroup properties for the VMkernel and do the opposite.

This way you have full redundancy and you have 1GB for both portgroups which is more than enough.

Duncan

VMware Communities User Moderator | VCP | VCDX

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