Is there anything wrong with using Active/Active when teaming

[MikeWright1971]

Hiya,

I am designing a VMware environment. I'm going to have 2 up-links going to 2 pSwitches.

The teaming method being used will be "route based on originating port ID ". Is there any reason I cannot set both uplinks to active/active?

cheers Mike

[bayupw]

Hi, 2 uplinks going to 2 pSwitches for example vmnic0 to pSwitch1 and vmnic1 to pSwitch2 will work fine if the two pSwitches is not clustered

VMware KB 2006129

Route Based on Originating Port ID

This is the load balancing method that is used by default on vSphere Standard and Distributed Switches. When this policy is in effect, only one VMNIC (physical NIC) is used per virtual NIC or VMkernel port. If a NIC's link goes down, the virtual NICs and VMkernel ports are reassigned to the remaining NICs that are up, and the host sends out advertisements to the physical switch to ensure the MAC address table is updated.

Advantages:

• Links in a team can be spread across multiple physical switches for hardware failure redundancy.

[MikeWright1971]

Hiya

After having meetings with our network team I have come up with this design. They proposed I use 4 switches as shown in the diagram. But as the storage network is isolated from the VM network, How would I connect an ISCI device directly to a VM. All our storage devices go on the storage network?

Is this the way to go or is something wrong?

[bayupw]

Just to clarify, are you using 2x 1G NIC & 4x 10G NIC?

Do the VMs need access the iSCSI storage directly or it will be just ESXi accessing iSCSI storage as datastore?

If the VMs need direct access to datastore, you can create a 2nd virtual network adapter on every VMs and connect it to the iSCSI network.

When using 2nd NIC, you might want to secure the iSCSI network to make sure that the iSCSI network is not being used as a backdoor network and avoid VM accessing other VMs from the iSCSI network