Nexus 1000v Uplink questions

[jonb157]

I'm a bit confused on how the uplinks works in my environment. Currently I have a Nexus 1000v installed for my datacenter and I've migrated by 4 ESXi hosts onto it and its working great.  These hosts are HP blades and running on the Flex-10 mapped to a Nexus 5k; so basically each ESXi host has 2 pNICs for the VM network. Here is my problem. I want to know get my other cluster on the 1000v, however those ESXi hosts are rackmount servers that have 4 pNics is a team with 2 nics going to one 3750 and the other 2 to another 3750.  We create an etherchannel port group for the those 4 teamed nics.  I don't think my current "system-uplink" will work for these hosts because of the different way we team the nics on the upstream switches. So, do I need to create another uplink on the 1000v for my ESXi rackmounts with the the etherchannel? And if so what kind of setting do I use for the port-channel? Currently for my first cluster I use the "channel group auto mode on mac-pinning", but I know this probably won't work for my second cluster.

[jonb157]

I forgot to add another piece of information about my second ESXi cluster. The 4 pnic teams use the "route based on IP hash" algorithm in LACP port-channel. This is NOT the case with my first cluster.

[logiboy123]

Do you mind uploading some screenshots of your configuration or a design diagram? You could blank out the actual IP addresses etc if you are concerned about security.

I would recommend reading the following article from VMware:

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/VMW_09Q1_WP_vSphereNetworking_P8_R1.pdf

Essentially dvUplinks act as a profile and teaming, failover and load balancing policies can be defined at this level. Think of it like this;

I have two hosts with 4 NIC's and I use 4 dvUplink profiles where;

Host1

dvUplink1 is mapped to vmnic3 and handles Management traffic

dvUplink2 is mapped to vmnic0 and handles vMotion traffic

dvUplink3 is mapped to vmnic1 and handles VM Networking traffic

dvUplink4 is mapped to vmnic2 and handles VM Networking traffic

Host2

dvUplink1 is mapped to vmnic2 and handles Management traffic

dvUplink2 is mapped to vmnic3 and handles vMotion traffic

dvUplink3 is mapped to vmnic1 and handles VM Networking traffic

dvUplink4 is mapped to vmnic0 and handles VM Networking traffic

dvUplink and traffic type remains the same, but the actual NIC used per host can change. This is especially useful in environments like yours where different hosts have different NIC's.

Typically I would try to have at least two uplinks assigned on a vDS, even if the NIC's are virtual in the case of a Flex-10, this is because vSphere wants to see two NIC's and has a cry when it can't.

Regards,

Paul