vSphere 6.5 with LACP - vMotion

[Stewaters]

I'm looking for some advice on a new setup.  I have 3 x ESXi 6.5 hosts with 4 x 10GB NICs.  We have Enterprise Plus licensing so we can use Distributed Switches.

I am planning on dedicating two of those NICs to iSCSI which leaves me with 2 x 10GB NICs for everything else LAN, vMotion and Management.

I was thinking of using LACP and combining the two remaining 10GB NICs to increase the bandwidth.  Ideally I would like all remaining traffic running over these two NICs.  I've partly configured this already but when I've come to do the vMotion config I'm unsure of how best to set this up.  I have previously always had two dedicated NICs for vMotion and had two port-groups with one active NIC assigned to each port-group for vMotion but in previous setups I've had more NICs to use.

What would be the best solution for a 4 10GB NIC host with two already assigned to iSCSI?

Many thanks,

[daphnissov · Accepted solution]

I would recommend not using LACP if you're licensed for a vDS but instead use VLANs and different port groups along with NIOC and the teaming policy of route based on physical NIC load (also called load-based teaming or LBT) to accomplish utilization of the two remaining 10 GbE uplinks. It is a common misconception that LACP is the only way to utilize two different uplinks simultanously. With ESXi and a vDS, LBT is a better option that requires less complexity on both the switch side and vSphere side.

[Stewaters]

Hi daphnissov,

Thanks for your reply.  So use route based on physical NIC load on all port groups on the vDS including the vMotion port groups?

Thanks,

[daphnissov]

With vMotion, I tend to use multi-NIC vMotion and alternate NICs in the team so each vmkernel port is active for only one NIC and standby for the other. This gets inverted for the second vmkernel port tagged for vMotion, thereby utilizing all the uplinks in parallel.