Port-Channels and VMNIC numbering

[JarrettCampbell]

I am setting up a new ESX cluster using 8 Dell PE2950s with the same HW config:

2 Onboard BC nics, a dual nic Intel card along with 2 4G HBA cards.

I have a 4510E Cisco Chassis that can Port Channel accross blades so I obviously want to take advantage of this. I am trying to setup a Port-Channel cabling scheme that will Port-Channel accross blades and NIC cards for max redundancy. My questions are:

1 - Any issues with Port-Channels mixing BC and Intel NICS??

2 - Is it safe to assume that the same vmnic numbers will be assigned to the same physical ports on all hosts if I do a scripted ESX install. I would hate to have to play "find the nic card" 8 times.

Any other tips would be great.

Thanks

[Steve_Tron]

Hi,

There should be no issues across nic chip sets, I have set simililar setups with dual and quad port nics to cisco switches both 6509 and 3750 stacks. As long as the dual nic cards are installed into the same pci bus/slots on each server the vmnic numbers should be the same across all servers. When you create your channels 802.3ad link agregation needs to be used (default for some Csico switches I think but you need to check) and also configure your virtual switch to mac address hashing for its load balancing scheme.

Regards

Steve

[JarrettCampbell]

Steve,

Thanks for the tips, however I have been told that IP hashing is best practice, any specific reason why you prefer mac hashing?

Thanks,

Jarrett

[Steve_Tron]

Hi,

Ooops yes IP hashing is best practice from the VMware side of things I don't know where mac came from it was very very late when I posted that sorry. I was probably thinking about the default hashing algorithm on the physical switch as some Cisco switches use mac hashing by default on etherchannels and this needed to be changed to IP hashing to match the vSwitch. That will teach me to read my posts before sending when tired!

Regards

[kjb007]

Make sure your cables are plugged in the same way in each host. I typically will only plug in the cable I need for the install, before adding in any other interfaces. That way, I know which NIC will be vmnic0, and don't have to go back and fix it later. If you don't, then whatever interface was active during install, will be vmnic0, and then lowest pci slot and function will be next, and so on.

-KjB

VMware vExpert

[Steve_Tron]

Well said I've been caught out with that before

Regards

Steve