vSS or vDS?

[Mike_MT]

I'm setting up some new servers all esxi 5 with enterprise plus licensing. I'm not sure if I should bother with vDS or not. I don't have 10gbe or Nexus or anything like that, just 1g NICs. In the past we've always done vSS with mutliple 1g links for redundancy, separate VLANs, etc. Is there any real advantage to vDS if I won't be using 10gbe? I also don't have a lot of hosts, only about 8 right now.

Mike

[TomHowarth]

There are plenty of advantages to using the DVS,

The following KB article give a high level overview Overview of vNetwork Distributed Switch concepts

to me one of the main features is the ability to keep VM network state on vMotion events,  this is especially useful in sites where there is a IPS/IDS solution in place.

[EdWilts]

There are many reasons to use vDS and one of the nice ones for us is dealing with all of the new vlans.  I can define them in exactly one place and I'm done for all of the hosts that are connected to that vDS.  If I rebuild that host, all of the port groups come back with doing anything extra.

A vDS keeps the environment nice and consistent.

That said, VMware did not implement the rest of their supporting components as well as they should have.  There is no supported PowerCLI interface to the vDS - there's a fling you can use but you can't even use a 64-bit PowerCLI window to run it in.  If you have no VSS on your host (and we don't), then you can't use the Web Client to create a new VM since you can't add a vNIC to the guest.  If you want to use the remote dump utility, you need a standard switch and an uplink.

I'm hoping that we'll see some better support from VMware announced next week - they need to quit giving us new features and then not fully supporting them.  vDS, Storage DRS, and the web client have all suffered from this.

[Mike_MT]

Thanks for the replies and information.

Here's how I have mine configured. I setup my physical switch with trunk ports to my esxi hosts. My esxi hosts all have several 1gb NICs. I setup one vDS switch and create port groups and assign VLANs to port groups (typically one VLAN per PG.)

Does the vDS automatically load balance across the physical NICs?

Mike

[Mike_MT]

Bump. Just want to make sure I understand how this works.

Does the vDS automatically load balance across the physical NICs?

Mike

[logiboy123]

No it does not automatically load balance. You will need setup the switch to use Load Based Teaming and should probably enable NIOC and SIOC.

Check out my blog for further details;

http://vrif.blogspot.com

Regards,

Paul

Update;

If you want to get more then 1Gbps of throughput for vMotion traffic you will need to create extra port groups. If you have two vMotion portgroups you can get 2Gbps throughput, 3 will give you 3Gbps throughput. You would configure these ports to only use a single uplink and would not configure LBT for them. Since the other ports have LBT configured they will route around vMotion traffic when it is happening. Or you can just use LBT for the whole lot, but it would be slightly more disruptive I think.

Message was edited by: logiboy123

[Mike_MT]

Ah - except that LBT is called 'Route based on physical NIC load' when doing the configuration.

Thanks for your help. I'll give it a try next week.

Mike

[Mike_MT]

I've got my NICs and LBT configured. Is there a way to see what VM is using what vmnic?

Mike

[MannyS]

There could be a vMA command or something you can use to view this info. But you should be able to see this info from the physical switch side of things. It should be able to tell you which VM is speaking on an interface.

[BMVMUser]

Paul,

How would you be getting more than 1Gbps throughput if you are only using a single uplink 1Gbs NIC?

Regards,

Elan

[logiboy123]

In a 1Gbps environment you can get extra throughput by creating a second vmkernel port for vMotion. Each port will use up to a maximum of 1Gbps. This only works in vSphere 5.x.

As an example you might have a switch setup like the following;

vSwitch0

Management - vmnic0 active / vmnic1 standby / vmnic2 standby

vMotionA - vmnic0 unused / vmnic1 active / vmnic2 unused

vMotionB - vmnic0 unused / vmnic1 unused / vmnic2 active

Regards,

Paul