Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 5.74
LAGs appear as
physical uplinks to
the distributed port
groups.
When using LAGs, you should be aware of a the following limitations:
You can't mix LAGs and physical uplinks for a given distributed port group. Any physical
uplinks must be listed as unused adapters.
◆
You can't use multiple active LAGs on a single distributed port group. Place one LAG in the
active uplinks list; place any other LAGs in the list of unused uplinks.
◆
Note that these limitations are per distributed port group; you can use different active LAGs
or standalone uplinks with other distributed port groups because the teaming and failover con-
i guration is set for each individual distributed port group.
Ignore the Load Balancing Setting with LAGs
When using LACP and LAGs with a version 5.5.0 distributed switch, you can ignore the Load
Balancing setting seen earlier in Figure 5.74. It is overridden by the load-balancing policy set on
the LAG(s).
As you can see, the enhanced LACP support present in vSphere 5.5 and version 5.5.0 distrib-
uted switches offers VMware administrators and their counterparts in the networking team a
great deal of functionality and l exibility.
We'd like to now turn our attention to some of the options available for using third-party dis-
tributed switches in your vSphere environment.
Examining h ird-Party Distributed Virtual Switches
When VMware i rst introduced distributed switches with vSphere 4.0 in 2009, it also enabled
third-party developers to produce their own distributed switches that would “plug in”
to vSphere's distributed switch APIs. This would allow VMware partners to extend the
