Bond NICs on Cisco Switch

[dratz]

I am just getting started with vSphere and ESXi, and would like to bond the two NICs on my host for redundancy and aggregation, but I'm confused with all the info for setting up the ports on my cisco switch. I'm using ESXi v 4.1.0,348481 and my switch is a Cisco 2960G.

On the switch I have set the EtherChannel Load-Balancing Configuration to be src-dst-ip. I have added two ports to the Channel-Group 1 and set channel-group 1 mode on. When I do show etherchannel protocol, I see that Group 1 has protocol PAgP instead of <Mode ON>. Is this correct?  This document http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=100404... shows the protocol as <Mode ON> so I am uncertain.

On the vCentre Client I changed the NIC teaming to Route based on ip hash as per the above document.

Is this correct? Is the PAgP on the switch OK or is there something I need to do to get it to show <Mode On> ??

Thanks,

Doug

[Josh26]

Hi,

Can you show us all the relevant sections of your config for the physical ports and the port-group?

[dratz]

Is this what you need? See attached screen shot.

Doug

[RBurns-WIS]

PAgP is a Cisco proprietary aggregation protocol.  ESX doesn't speak PAgP or LACP for that matter.

You should be using mode "on".   You've pasted your Port channel config, can you also paste the output of:

show run int gi0/25

show run int gi0/26

Thanks,

Robert

[dratz]

Attached it the show run of the two ports. If I configure the port 25 and/or 26 with the command

channel-group 1 mode on

I don't get any error message, but the group doesn't change from PAgP to ON. A show etherchannel summary still shows it as PAgP.

Is this a limitation on my switch, a catalyst 2960? Or am I missing a command(s) ?

Doug

[depping]

First of all I would ask why you would want to do this? Is there any specific requirement for this? If not, keep it simple as from a performance perspective there are very little workloads that will actually benefit from this.

Duncan (VCDX)

Available now on Amazon: vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS technical deepdive

[RBurns-WIS]

Doug,

That's not right. You might want to rebuild the PC from scratch using the method below.  Make sure you put your host in maint mode so you don't disrupt any VMs.

switch(config)#no int po1
switch(config)#int range gi0/25-26

switch(config-if-range)#channel-group 1 mode on

switch(config-if-range)#do show ether-channel summary

Let me know if this helps.

As for "why" would you want to do this for the question below.  The answer is simply for aggregate bandwidth.  Yes hashing by virtual port ID is simple, but you're prone to choking an uplink if there's a large flow of traffic.  You can minimize your risk by setting preferred opposing NICs for VMotion, Management and/or Data traffic, but you're still not going to get as much bandwidth efficiency as you will from an Etherchannel.

(Disclosure I work for Cisco)

Regards,

Robert

[dratz]

I tried the commands, but didn't have any success. It didn't like the "no int pol"  nor the "do show ether-channel summary" commands.

What can I try now?

Thanks,

Doug

Edit: Found the command should be etherchannel (no hyphen) but it still shows PAgP as the protocol. -Doug

[dratz]

I've got it working now. Here's what I did:

int range g0/25-26

no channel-group

channel-group 1 mode on

Then to check:

show etherchannel protocol

and

show etherchannel summary

Results attached. Thanks very much for the help getting me going.

Doug