VMWare NIC teaming benefits?
OK, I'm more of a software guy and I inherited this VMWare setup, so please be gentle.
I have 2 ESXi 4.1 hosts here at my office. Dell PE R710. Each has an additional 4 port Broadcom NIC for a total of 8 ports each.
The outside firm plugged just 1 cable from each host to the switch. I plugged in a few more and I see them working in the vsphere client.
I see a vSwitch0 was setup with all 8 nics. I'm pretty familiar with nic teaming and how I would do this on the vmware side as well as the switch side.
Question is - what should I do? Connect all 8 ports from host to switch, then setup an etherchannel on the switch? Will this get me faster bandwidth from host to host?
Or should I take 4 ports from the host and create an etherchannel, then take the other 4 ports and create a 2nd etherchannel?
Or just plug all 8 into my switch and call it a day?
I have 2 ESXi 4.1 hosts here at my office. Dell PE R710. Each has an additional 4 port Broadcom NIC for a total of 8 ports each.
The outside firm plugged just 1 cable from each host to the switch. I plugged in a few more and I see them working in the vsphere client.
I see a vSwitch0 was setup with all 8 nics. I'm pretty familiar with nic teaming and how I would do this on the vmware side as well as the switch side.
Question is - what should I do? Connect all 8 ports from host to switch, then setup an etherchannel on the switch? Will this get me faster bandwidth from host to host?
Or should I take 4 ports from the host and create an etherchannel, then take the other 4 ports and create a 2nd etherchannel?
Or just plug all 8 into my switch and call it a day?
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OK, sorry for abandoning this question. Auditors in the last few weeks so I've been swamped with them, no fun.
OK, let's change this a bit. All of my VM's are on local storage, no SAN/NAS here. No vMotion.
I have 2 ESXi hosts, and a separate Win2008 physical server with Veeam 7 doing our backups. The Win2008 server also has 4 nics. Can I set the Win2008 server up as an etherchannel on my Cisco switch and get faster Veeam backups??
I would also have to setup 4 nics from the ESXi host as an ethercahnnel on my switch as well? I could get 4GB throughput for backups? Is that possible?? Thanks.
OK, let's change this a bit. All of my VM's are on local storage, no SAN/NAS here. No vMotion.
I have 2 ESXi hosts, and a separate Win2008 physical server with Veeam 7 doing our backups. The Win2008 server also has 4 nics. Can I set the Win2008 server up as an etherchannel on my Cisco switch and get faster Veeam backups??
I would also have to setup 4 nics from the ESXi host as an ethercahnnel on my switch as well? I could get 4GB throughput for backups? Is that possible?? Thanks.
This is now going off-topic, but quickly.....
Yes you can create a Network BOND, e.g. 2GBps by combining two Ethernet 1GBps network interfaces, we do this with our backup servers.
I believe Cisco refer to it as a channel group.
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/switches/datacenter/nexus1000/sw/4_0/interface/configuration/guide/if_5portchannel.html
Yes you can create a Network BOND, e.g. 2GBps by combining two Ethernet 1GBps network interfaces, we do this with our backup servers.
I believe Cisco refer to it as a channel group.
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/switches/datacenter/nexus1000/sw/4_0/interface/configuration/guide/if_5portchannel.html
Create a multiple vSwitches as suggested above and assign the Uplink accordingly