Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
same physical switch. Some newer switches support link aggregation across physical switches,
but otherwise all the physical network adapters will need to connect to the same switch. In
addition, the switch must be coni gured for link aggregation. ESXi coni gured to use a vSphere
Standard Switch supports standard 802.3ad teaming in static (manual) mode—sometimes
referred to as EtherChannel in Cisco networking environments—but does not support the Link
Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) or Port Aggregation Protocol (PAgP) commonly found on
switch devices. Link aggregation will increase overall aggregate throughput by potentially com-
bining the bandwidth of multiple physical network adapters for use by a single virtual network
adapter of a VM.
Another consideration to point out when using the IP hash-based load-balancing policy is
that all physical NICs must be set to active instead of some coni gured as active and some as
passive. This is because of the way IP hash-based load balancing works between the virtual
switch and the physical switch.
Figure 5.35 shows a snippet of the coni guration of a Cisco switch coni gured for link aggre-
gation. Keep in mind that other switch manufacturers will have their own ways of coni guring
link aggregation, so refer to your specii c vendor's documentation.
Figure 5.35
h e physical
switches must
be confi gured to
support the IP
hash-based load-
balancing policy.
Perform the following steps to alter the NIC teaming load-balancing policy of a vSwitch:
1.
Use the vSphere Web Client to establish a connection to a vCenter Server instance.
2.
Using your method of choice, navigate to the specii c ESXi host that has the vSwitch
whose NIC teaming coni guration you wish to modify.
3.
With an ESXi host selected, go to the Manage tab, select Networking, and then make sure
that Virtual Switches is highlighted.
4.
Select the name of the virtual switch from the list of virtual switches, and then click the
Edit icon (it looks like a pencil).
5.
In the Edit Settings dialog box, select Teaming And Failover, and then select the desired
load-balancing strategy from the Load Balancing drop-down list, as shown in Figure 5.36.
6.
Click OK to save the changes.
Now that we've explained the load-balancing policies—and before we explain explicit
failover order—let's take a deeper look at the failover and failback of uplinks in a NIC team.
There are two parts to consider: failover detection and failover policy. We'll cover both of these
in the next section.
