Two NICs Active versus Active and Standby Query

[RobBuxton]

Hi All,

A topic covered in a number of posts but I'm struggling with the benefits of a couple of approaches for the Service Console and VMotion.

I can have the SC and Vmotion on the same switch connected to a Team of two NICs, both NICs flagged as Active for both the SC and VMotion. Which seems nice and simple.

Or I can have the SC and Vmotion on the same switch connected to a Team of two NICs, but have say NIC0 Active for SC and Standby for VMotion and NIC1 as Active for VMotion and Standby for SC. Which has been suggested as the solution in similar queries.

Why would I use the second option? I'm confused as to what benefits would come from this approach.

[Dave_Mishchenko · Accepted solution]

You would use your active/standby configure as you describe below if you wanted to ensure that SC and vmotion traffic would never interfere with each other under normal operating conditions. But as you say, most people find it to be OK to just combine SC/vmotion traffic in an active/active team. The active / standby setup would be more beneficial in you needed to combine SC/vmotion/ and VM traffic in a vswitch of 2 pNICs and you didn't want SC/vmotino to interfere with VM traffic.

Otherwise another practical use of active/standby setup would be when the 2 pNICs in the vSwitch are different speeds and you want to ensure that traffic is sent over the fastest NIC and that the slowest is only used during a failure.