Move from LAG to LBT on a vDS?

[EHSAB]

Hi,

I have a couple of hosts and a vDS with two uplinks each in a LAG using Route based on IP Hash, that's working fine.

I've been searching for a best practise way of migrating from LAGs (and Route based on IP Hash) to just plain physical ports (vlan trunks) and Load Based Teaming (phy NIC load).

But to my surprise i could not find a single article or blogpost discussing this procedure. Perhaps it's just that easy and obvious that i should know it already

My hosts are on 6.0 and so is my vDS.

Kind Regards

Magnus

[vfk]

Hi, It is fairly straight forward process, but there are a lot of steps involved, it is probably to do this in scheduled maintenance window so you don't negatively impact the performance of your workload as your host in maintenance.

Assumptions:

• Management network is not on LAG.

Here are high level steps:

• Place host in maintenance mode.
• Break/remove the lag on the switch, and reconfigure interface as trunks with correct vlans
• Reconfigure with vDS/Portgroup with LBT
• Test your new config.  Easy way to test is to create a temp vmkernel interface and ping it.
• Set DRS to manual move a VM manual, make sure everything is working.
• Set DRS back to its original settings - Fully automated?
• Proceed to next host

[EHSAB]

Hi vfk, thank you for taking the time to reply.

My problem is that i have eight hosts, identically configured for the dvUplinks.

My understanding is that I can't switch one host at a time? That may be false, but that's how i understand it.

Or is it possible to have one host using LBT and another use IP Hash in the same VDS?

If that's the case then i don't have any migration issues.

I can't bring down all eight hosts, i need to figure out how to do this without downtime.

But if i can vmotion VMs off from one host and change that one and then vmotion them back, then I'm all good.

Kind Regards

Magnus

[vfk]

Hi Ehsab,

You are right, if you modify the existing Portgroup you will break everything.  You will have to create a new portgroup and move vms over to new portgroup.

How many nics do you have in the LAG?  Can you free some vmnics to assist with the migration?  Having spare vmnics will make your entire reconfiguration a lot simpler.

[EHSAB]

Hi,

The VDS has 2x10G dvuplinks configured today, then i have another VDS for iSCSI and Management.

I can easily add another pair of 2x10G to the servers, so i guess that's the way forward, create a third VDS and add two dvuålinks as active and then copy Portgroups from original VDS to the new one and migrate VMs over to that VDS.

I guess i could remove one of the dvuplinks aswell from the original VDS and add that to the a new VDS, but that's a bit risky in my opinion, removing the Ha and create a SPOF.

Thanks for your input.

Kind Regards

Magnus