all the time Etherchannel when 2 o more pNICs?

[escapem2]

hi guys

I have a confusion here.....

Do I have to configure all the time Etherchannel when teaming 2 or more vmnics?

Let's say an enviroment when I have a server with 6 physical nics

so I create a Management/vMotion 2 physical nics-2 vmnics

and 4 physical nics-4vmnics

Do I have to configure Etherchannel at the Switch level all the time? or the vmware nic teaming will handle it?

thanks a lot

[a_p_]

You don't have to configure EtherCahnnel at all if there's no special requirement for it. VMware's round robin pNIC assignment works perfectly in most cases and you can even connect the uplinks to different physical switches without the need to do any special configuration on them.

André

[escapem2]

really

so according to my example I can have the 4 physical NICs connected to 2 physical Switch? and it won't be any problem?

[escapem2]

I asked you second question because few days ago I was in a configuration where they wanted High availability so they used 2 physical Switch and I was reading here that if 2 NICs were to one swtich and the other 2 NICs to the other switch...this will cause MAC address flapping....

so in that enviroment I create a virtual switch for every physical switch....

[a_p_ · Accepted solution]

With the default settings "Route based on originating Port ID" a VM's vmnic will be assigned to an uplink at the time the VM is powered on and only be failed over to another uplink in case of a failure of the current uplink. You will not see the VM's MAC address on more than one port at a time.

Regarding EtherChannel. With the current implementation this is limited to static EtherChannel only, so you won't be able to setup link aggregation without the Nexus 1000V add-on for the Enterprise Plus edition.

Besides a couple of KB articles I'd recommend you take a look at http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/virtual_networking_concepts.pdf which covers the different configuration options.

André

[escapem2]

thanks a lot

I was thinking I was confused (and now I see I was)....Now I understood why the new NIC Teaming policy for vDS named NIC Load Balance...basically no Etherchannel is configured and VM traffic is send according to NIC Load

so when would be recommending to use Etherchannel and when no?

[a_p_]

... so when would be recommending to use Etherchannel and when no?

Good question, I actually never needed it. Maybe a use case would be a download server from which hundreds of guests download files or stream anything. Due to the IP-Hash load balancing - which has to be used in this case - the outgoing traffic would be distributed across all uplinks in the EtherChannel based on the IP addresses.

André

[rickardnobel]

escapem2 wrote:

so when would be recommending to use Etherchannel and when no?

As a.p. noted, it is only useful if you have a large amount of different clients needing a lot of bandwidth simultaneously, perhaps a WSUS server or some Configuration Manager device or similar.

However, setting up Etherchannel / IP hash does make the configuration both more complex and less redundant, so in almost all cases the default Port ID policy is the best.

[escapem2]

thanks  a lot guys

I appreciate the valuable information and now I realized I was wrong...thanks