To etherchannel or not?

[AllBlack]

Hi guys,

We are changing our ESX configuration as we bought a new storage solution.

I was wondering if someone could give me some advice whether to use etherchannel or not.

I don't have much knowledge of advanced networking so excuse my ignorance.

We started with enabling etherchannel on the switch ports that connect to our ESX NFS nics.

I have two nics dedicated to NFS IP storage (both on different chipsets) and I set both of them to active.

I left the Load balancing policy to the default originating port ID.

In this scenario, I am able to connect to some volumes but not others. Once we removed etherchanneling

on the switch it works fine. I have done some reading and could it be that it is because I am using the wrong load balance policy and it should be IP hash?

That leads to the following question, should we etherchannel at all? In our "old" setup, I have a NIC team of two active NICS on my data vswitch (not etherchanneled and default settings)

This seem to provide me with good failover.

Cheers

Please consider marking my answer as "helpful" or "correct"

[vmroyale]

Hello.

We started with enabling etherchannel on the switch ports that connect to our ESX NFS nics.

I have two nics dedicated to NFS IP storage (both on different chipsets) and I set both of them to active.

I left the Load balancing policy to the default originating port ID.

In this scenario, I am able to connect to some volumes but not others. Once we removed etherchanneling

on the switch it works fine. I have done some reading and could it be that it is because I am using the wrong load balance policy and it should be IP hash?

Yes, Route based on IP hash is the policy that is used with etherchannel.

That leads to the following question, should we etherchannel at all? In our "old" setup, I have a NIC team of two active NICS on my data vswitch (not etherchanneled and default > settings)

How many IP addresses are you talking to on the NFS box? If you have enough different addresses, then you can get good balancing and throughput with this setup. The thing is, you may not actually need it, depending on the workloads, number of VMs, etc. You could always save the advanced setup, for if and when you ever truly need it.

Good Luck!

[AllBlack]

How many IP addresses are you talking to on the NFS box? If you have enough different addresses, then you can get good balancing and throughput with this setup. The thing is, you may not actually need it, depending on the workloads, number of VMs, etc. You could always save the advanced setup, for if and when you ever truly need it.

We have two filers in the netapp and they each have one IP. I don't expect much usage/workloads on this particular site to be honest

cheers

Please consider marking my answer as "helpful" or "correct"

[vmroyale]

We have two filers in the netapp and they each have one IP. I don't expect much usage/workloads on this particular site to be honest

You're in great shape with that NetApp setup, if you do ever want to implement the etherchannel. Sounds like keeping it simple with the light workload probably is the best bet for now.

[vanak]

You should make aliases on your netapp vif, in order to get several pairs of ip involved in your network communications. If you've have only one IP referring to one datastore (NFS for your case), etherchannel is not very usefull. It's great with all vSwitch & vmkernel configured with "route based on ip hash", you network switch well configured and several different Ip connections to your nfs datastores.

Here they are several usefull links, and for sur they will be more than helpfull for what you want to plan

Cheers.

( you may need a "now account" on netapp for this one)