How to properly configure load balencing in ESX 4i
I have a lab ESX4i server setup. I believe I configure the 2 nics I have for load balancing, but when I copy a 600mg file to another system it's very slow. Now I just rebuilt this esx server from scratch. It work fine before. The system I'm coping the files too has 2 1gb nics configured as teaming.
What do I need to check to make sure I configured it correctly?
Unless you have Cisco EtherChannel with trunking you are not going to get true load balancing. It does a type of round robin and it provides failover. The round robin is per VM.
namoom
This is two sided- most of the load balancing is per flow, even with cisco devices. With per flow balancing when you start the file copy it is only 1 flow. I feel obliged to say that with the management nic on esx servers (which is used for the copy) they really only use 1 of the nics for most traffic regardless of configuration. Also realize you are using NFS for the file copy, ESXi has a funny stack for dealing with NFS that can be slower.
Paul Solovyovsky
namoon: Good point but with NFS I've actually had faster responce then with iSCSi, I believe most of that is due to overhead of iSCSI vs native file level througput and scsi locking. Per flow on iSCSI has been upgraded on ESX 4 with multipath and severak vmkernel ports, so no longer do we have to deal with a max. of 1GB throughput no matter how many nics we have.
rdefino: If it was working before take a look at the other side. Copy the same file from a physical server to your destination, it could be several issues that are not related to ESX.