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APPIREDDY

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nic teaming on esxi management interface

Hi Guys,
i have installed vmware esxi 4.0 on Dell PE blade server. it has got one quadcore NIC. i want to enable active-active laod balancing/nic teaming on management intefrace.but the problem is when enable the nic teaming on management interface from VI client and try accessing it i'm loosing connectivity to the management interface.can some one suggest what i'm supposed to do?
regards
red
Avatar of Paul Solovyovsky
Paul Solovyovsky
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If you're setting up a VM Network on the same vswitch as your management interface and you have 4 nics attached to it then vmware will do a very basic load balance.  It will assign the VMs to different physical nics and will run then on that interface untill there is a need to failover.

The only way to do active load balancing is to setup Cisco ehterchannel on a switch and setup trunk ports.  This will aggregate and load balance the 4 ports.

You can also create a separate vswitch for your virtual machines so that your management port is on a separate vswitch and is not competing for bandwidth (albeit it is not large amount)

On the new vswitch you can assign 2 or 3 physical nics and you're set.  Unless you have a lot of VMs and/or high throuphput VMs the basic load balancing works just fine, I have had several dozon VMs on a single vswitch with 2 physical nics with no issues in the past
Like paul said, if you dont have many VMs the internal load balancing is good enough but take note, as this is only for outbound traffic for proper load balancing outbound& inbound traffic standard link aggregation protocol such as LACP is required

I suggest the following

vSwitch0(mgmt/vmk) = vmnic0 & vmnic1 (put both to active in the vSwitch failover policy)
vSwitch1(VM network) = vmnic2 & vmnic3 (put both to active in the vSwitch failover policy)
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