Is Load Based Teaming supported for NFS vmkernel ports?

[hennish]

(reposting here, since the Communities 'Move' feature doesn't seem to work)

Hi. My customer has 2 x 10 GbE uplinks per host, which we use in a dvSwitch that handles all types of traffic (mgmt, vMotion, NFS, VM-traffic).

Since they don't have LACP/Etherchannel on their switches, and all NFS exports (on NetApp) are on one single subnet/VLAN, I have two questions:

1. Is it at all supported (by VMware and/or NetApp) to run everything over one single vmkernel port on one single subnet? It's not listed as an alternative in http://www.netapp.com/us/library/technical-reports/tr-3749.html as far as I can see.

2. Is it supported to use Load Based Teaming on the port group of the above mentioned NFS vmkernel port?

I don't think the bandwidth will be an issue on these 10 GbE links, but I would like to run LBT if possible. If it's not supported for NFS traffic, at least I can run it on the VM port groups, which I assume will load balance the VMs to another uplink in case of traffic going above 75 % for more than 30 seconds.

If you have an answer to questions 1 and/or 2, please include a reference of some kind. I know LBT will probably "work just fine", but what I need is water tight supportability.

Thanks in advance!

[chriswahl]

1. Is it at all supported (by VMware and/or NetApp) to run everything over one single vmkernel port on one single subnet? It's not listed as an alternative in http://www.netapp.com/us/library/technical-reports/tr-3749.html as far as I can see.

I assume you mean a single vmkernel port for NFS traffic? This is a common practice and is included in many vendor build guides (Vblock comes to mind as one). I'm curious what your use case is for additional NFS vmkernel ports on a single subnet, as they would sit idle.

[hennish]

Hi. Well, sort of. The four options that I have are:

1. Single vmk, single VLAN/subnet, load balancing using "IP Hash" and appropriate "teaming" (Etherchannel/Static LACP..) in the physical switches.

2. Dual vmk, dual VLANs/subnets, load balancing using "Port ID" and no "teaming" in the physical switches.

3. Single vmk, single VLAN/subnet, load balancing using "Port ID" and no "teaming" in the physical switches.

4. Single vmk, single VLAN/subnet, load balancing using "LBT" and no "teaming" in the physical switches.

Of the above options, only 1 and 2 are mentioned in NetApp's white paper on configuring and using vSphere with NetApp

(http://media.netapp.com/documents/tr-3749.pdf - paragraph 3.6 and 3.7), which made me wonder whether options 3 and 4 are supported/recommended or not.

[rickardnobel]

Anders Olsson wrote:

3. Single vmk, single VLAN/subnet, load balancing using "Port ID" and no "teaming" in the physical switches.

4. Single vmk, single VLAN/subnet, load balancing using "LBT" and no "teaming" in the physical switches.

Of the above options, only 1 and 2 are mentioned in NetApp's white paper on configuring and using vSphere with NetApp, which made me wonder whether options 3 and 4 are supported/recommended or not.

For option 3 this would mean that your NFS traffic always will use a single 10 Gbit adapter and keep the other passive as redundancy. I did not really understood if you were also using the same physical NICs for VM traffic, vMotion and other? If so you have a certain risk that by unluck all of your most network intensive VMKs / VMs might be assigned to the same vmnic from the Port ID quite static distribution.

For option 4 then it would be same, only one link used by VMK for NFS, but you would get a guarantee that the network load is somewhat evenly distributed over your two 10 Gbit vmnics.