ESXi 5 dvswitch and Cisco Nexus 5548

[kcucadmin]

I'm waiting for recommendations from my vendor here, but i seamed to stump them when i suggested a dvswitch layout and not standard virtual switches.

My questions are, how would you normaly setup the dvswitch uplink to a VPC Domain With a Primary and Secondary 5548.

i will have a 2 port emulex in each host.  so 1 port to primary, 1 port to secondary.  but what settings would you use on the DVSwitch, UPlink, etc.

Static Port Binding, VLAN Trunking?

i'm looking for any good write ups, or documentation, perhaps i'm just not seeing it out there.  most of the cisco documentation assumes you have a nexus 1000v in the mix, which i will not.

i've attached a summary PDF of the design any help would be greatly appreciated.

[lwatta]

The Nexus 5000s in your diagram will look like one switch to your ESXi host.

This will allow you to do an etherchannel from the ESXi host to the upstream N5Ks.

You or your network admin will need to configure the links from the 5548 to the ESXi host similar to below

lets say your host is plugged into port 1/15 on both switches

on N5K1

N5K-UCS-1# show run int eth 1/15

interface Ethernet1/15
  switchport mode trunk
  spanning-tree port type edge trunk
  channel-group 5

N5K-UCS-1# sho run int port-channel 5

interface port-channel5
  switchport mode trunk
  vpc 15
  speed 10000

N5K-UCS-1# show run vpc

interface port-channel5
  vpc 15

On N5K2 it should look identical (assuming all the ports are the same)

On the ESXi host put both nics in the same dVswitch and set the load balancing algorithm to "IP HASH"

Make sure the load balancing algorithm on the switches matches as well

N5K2(config)# port-channel load-balance ethernet source-dest-ip

N5K2(config)# show port-channel load-balance

Port Channel Load-Balancing Configuration:
System: source-dest-ip

Give that a try and let us know how it goes.

louis

[kcucadmin]

I thought "IP Hash" was a no no for some reason, i can't remember why but seams like i was always told to use "Mac" or PORT.  but i had HP switches before, maybe "IP Hash" is fine for the cisco.

wish i could remember why but your the second person to mention to me ip hash, and i just can't remember why i wasn't suppose to use ip hash...

[vGuy]

There is a vDS best practices doc, I think it would be helpful for you:

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/vsphere-distributed-switch-best-practices.pdf

IP hash is not recommended due to the complexity it brings in. Since you will be using vDS, I suggest you to look at the LBT as well, as an aternative for balancing the traffic across multiple uplinks...

[vm-au-user]

I'm interested to know, how would the nexus config change if you wanted to LBT (Load Balance Teaming) design?

Is it the same, just without the port-channel?

[Darkn355]

I have a similar setup and would like to know the answer to this as well.  If I have 2 Nexus 7Ks how would I configure the ports if I want to use Load Balance Teaming (LBT) on the VMware side w/ my distributed switch?  Can't seem to find any docs on this specific setup.  Would I just configure them as access ports?