pzozulka
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vSphere Networking: NIC Teaming without static trunks
In our vSphere environment, we have a standard vSwitch made up of two physical NICs setup with NIC Teaming.
However, on the physical switch (HP ProCurve), the two switch ports (connected to the above mentioned NICs) are not configured to be in a TRUNK or LACP.
How is this affecting our environment? Everything seems to be running fine.
The below article says that to use NIC Teaming you need to setup static TRUNKs.
VMware KB
However, on the physical switch (HP ProCurve), the two switch ports (connected to the above mentioned NICs) are not configured to be in a TRUNK or LACP.
How is this affecting our environment? Everything seems to be running fine.
The below article says that to use NIC Teaming you need to setup static TRUNKs.
VMware KB
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depends on the configuration, you have.
usually it's recommended to Stack, than Trunk.
usually it's recommended to Stack, than Trunk.
"we cannot achieve link aggregation with this type of setup. Right? "
Correct. It has to be either a single physical switch or a set of switches that act as single switch through stacking, Cisco VSS or Procurve IRF.
Steve
Correct. It has to be either a single physical switch or a set of switches that act as single switch through stacking, Cisco VSS or Procurve IRF.
Steve
ASKER
What if we don't have switches that stack. As mentioned earlier, our 2 core switches are trunked together.
If NIC1 is connected to switch1 and NIC2 is connected to switch2 wouldn't this cause a loop in the network?
If NIC1 is connected to switch1 and NIC2 is connected to switch2 wouldn't this cause a loop in the network?
Yes that's a spanning tree loop
ASKER
What if we have spanning-tree enabled on all switches? Does this setup become OK then?
Have you tested it?
Does it work?
Eg pull power out of switch !
Does it work?
Eg pull power out of switch !
ASKER
Yep, tested powering off an entire switch, and it works fine. We do see about 4 ping replies time out, but then everything is back to normal running on a single core switch.
Having said that, with spanning tree enabled on all switches, does this NIC Team setup become OK?
Having said that, with spanning tree enabled on all switches, does this NIC Team setup become OK?
ASKER
After doing a ton of research, it is absolutely fine to have a NIC team on a vSwitch policy having one of the NICs connected to Switch one and having the other NIC connected to switch two. In the event one of the switches fails or needs to go down for maintenance, the network traffic keeps flowing uninterrupted.
WIth this NIC team strategy, you're not going to get link aggregation in terms of bandwidth improvement, but more than likely (unless its a huge network), you probably not going to get much of a bandwidth improvement with link aggregation to begin with. We have about 40 VMs, and our network monitoring software is telling us that we're only using 10% of our bandwidth on average on our 1 Gbps network.
Lastly, even with our setup, we are still doing load balancing both ways -- traffic leaving the ESXi hosts, and traffic going back. Why? Our NIC Team policy on the ESXi hosts is set to "Route based on the originating virtual switch port ID". "When you use this setting, traffic from a given virtual Ethernet adapter is consistently sent to the same physical adapter unless there is a failover to another adapter in the NIC team. Replies are received on the same physical adapter as the physical switch learns the port association. This setting provides an even distribution of traffic if the number of virtual Ethernet adapters is greater than the number of physical adapters." -- VMware Virtual Networking Concepts (page 8). The reason we are getting load balancing using this NIC Team policy is because some of the VMs will choose to consistently use one of the NICs in the team, while other VMs are consistently using the other NIC.
Lastly there is a big difference between load balancing and load sharing. The previous paragraph is referring to NIC team policy for your production VM network traffic. It's a bit different for vSwitch NIC team settings for your IP Storage connectivity (which VMware recommends to separate away from your VM network traffic). The difference is as follows: Even if you setup full on link aggregation -- even if you set route based on IP hash as a NIC teaming option and Etherchannel(Cisco) on your connected switch to support link aggregation and redundancy in both directions -- "There is only one active pipe for the connection between the ESX server and a single storage target. This means that although there may be alternate connections available for failover, the bandwidth for a signle datastore and the underlying storage is limited to what a single connection can provide." -- VMware NFS Best Practices (page 7).
WIth this NIC team strategy, you're not going to get link aggregation in terms of bandwidth improvement, but more than likely (unless its a huge network), you probably not going to get much of a bandwidth improvement with link aggregation to begin with. We have about 40 VMs, and our network monitoring software is telling us that we're only using 10% of our bandwidth on average on our 1 Gbps network.
Lastly, even with our setup, we are still doing load balancing both ways -- traffic leaving the ESXi hosts, and traffic going back. Why? Our NIC Team policy on the ESXi hosts is set to "Route based on the originating virtual switch port ID". "When you use this setting, traffic from a given virtual Ethernet adapter is consistently sent to the same physical adapter unless there is a failover to another adapter in the NIC team. Replies are received on the same physical adapter as the physical switch learns the port association. This setting provides an even distribution of traffic if the number of virtual Ethernet adapters is greater than the number of physical adapters." -- VMware Virtual Networking Concepts (page 8). The reason we are getting load balancing using this NIC Team policy is because some of the VMs will choose to consistently use one of the NICs in the team, while other VMs are consistently using the other NIC.
Lastly there is a big difference between load balancing and load sharing. The previous paragraph is referring to NIC team policy for your production VM network traffic. It's a bit different for vSwitch NIC team settings for your IP Storage connectivity (which VMware recommends to separate away from your VM network traffic). The difference is as follows: Even if you setup full on link aggregation -- even if you set route based on IP hash as a NIC teaming option and Etherchannel(Cisco) on your connected switch to support link aggregation and redundancy in both directions -- "There is only one active pipe for the connection between the ESX server and a single storage target. This means that although there may be alternate connections available for failover, the bandwidth for a signle datastore and the underlying storage is limited to what a single connection can provide." -- VMware NFS Best Practices (page 7).
Top work well done.
Steve
Steve
ASKER
Although on ESXi side, the vSwitch is configured for NIC Teaming with the two NICs, the 1st NIC goes to the 1st core switch (ProCurve), and the 2nd NIC goes to the 2nd core switch (ProCurve).
The two switches are connected to each other via:
trunk A14,B14,C14,C16 Trk1 Trunk
So, sjepson, I think you're right in that we cannot achieve link aggregation with this type of setup. Right?