asked on 9/13/2010

Best way to setup dual NIC NAS and ESXi Server

Hey guys

Got a thecus n8800 pro, with dual NICs that supports Load Balance, Failover, Balance-XOR, 802.3ad, Balance-TLB and Balance-ALB.

I have, if needed a Procurve 1810G-8 Switch which supports, LACP trunking.

and One ESXi server with a dual port Gig-E NIC that i want to dedicate to storage.

Could you guys please see the attached PDF of my proposed scenarios and advise?

thank you

Visio-Drawing12.pdf

Networking Protocols VMware Network Architecture

Last Comment

Paul Solovyovsky

9/15/2010

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Paul Solovyovsky

9/13/2010

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wsc-it

9/13/2010

ASKER

thats a very long approach to it, is it the best way in order for me to achieve teh best speed?

I want ot max out both lan links as the VMs will be booting from this nas

Paul Solovyovsky

9/13/2010

You can't do that with a trunk link and a single IP on the NAS connecting to a single IP on ESXi host. Remember, your diagram shows that for a trunk to do load balancing it has to be a one to many or many many (mac/ip) connection.

wsc-it

9/13/2010

ASKER

Whats the easiest way to achieve what i am after then

lets say i have one ESX 4 box, 2 nics, a managed switch and dual nic NAS, which CAN seperate the NICs if need be

i just want to use both nics for all nas traffic

Paul Solovyovsky

9/13/2010

The easiest way to do this is to create several IPs on the NAS and have each datastore using a different IP. If not than you have to setup Multipath as described. If not then your link with will failover only.

chkdsk01

9/13/2010

wsc - paulsolov is correct in his approach. Just wanted to add one thing. ESX(i) is not LACP compliant, so on the switch side, configure your trunks as multimode trunk, not LACP.

wsc-it

9/14/2010

ASKER

Ok, ill take the first suggestion

So on the switch, How shouldi configure the ports, POrts 1 and 2 are from the NAS, ports 3 and 4 are to the ESXi box?

Also, What mode should i run the NAS, in any of the NIC sharing modes? or induvidually?

Paul Solovyovsky

9/15/2010

I would configure the NAS Ports with LACP to the HP switch (setup trk ports) on hp switch. The ESXi ports to the switch can be either teamed on the vswitch with nothing done on the physical switch or a trunk (you setup the trunk on the ip switc and setup ip hash on the vswitch). I would do the teaming to keep it easy. In both cases since you're doing a one to one ip/mac you will only get one port worth of data and the other will be failover. If you configure multipath you can load balance the traffic

wsc-it

9/15/2010

ASKER

so configure each device as you just said then configure multipath ?

Paul Solovyovsky

9/15/2010

If you setup both the the NAS and ESXI with trunk ports on the physical switch, then on the NAS setup to use trunk, on the ESXi setup to use ip hash. Once done setup Multipath, (basically multiple vmkernel ports that will give you a many to one connection) which will allow you have multiple sessions and thus load balance on the trunk.