VMware ESX LACP Support

Mailman List Mirror (Read Only)
1

I would like to design VSS LACP based MECs with ESX hosts.

Does VMware ESX support LACP?

Do we need Nexus 1000 for ESX LACP support?

R/
Manu

2

ESX does NOT support LACP out of the box. Not sure about the nexus 1kv.

Thanks,
Josh Smith
KD8HRX
email/jabber: juicewvu@gmail.com
phone: 304.237.9369(c)

3

Does not out of the box mean that there is an LACP 'fix' ?

4

I would like to design VSS LACP based MECs with ESX hosts.
Does VMware ESX support LACP?

No, ESX does not support the LACP protocol for control and negotiation of
link aggregation.

Should you want link aggregation, and the default load balancing
operation of ESX
does not meet requirements, it is possible to use a statically configured
aggregation in non-negotiated ("on") state; or a third party solution.

The standard way to load balance NICs in ESX, is to just plug in
additional NICs to the
same network, add the extra pNICs to the same vSwitch, and have all
NICs in 'active' mode.
The default operation is Load balancing based on Originating vSwitch port ID.

That is, every time a new vNIC is connected to the vSwitch, it is
assigned a port ID,
which can be used to distribute outgoing traffic from the the vNICs
among the pNICs,
so individual VMs can be load balanced.

Do we need Nexus 1000 for ESX LACP support?

The Nexus 1000v for ESX has LACP as a supported feature.

The Nexus 1000v is one third party solution for VS link aggregation
for Enterprise Plus ESX environments that use the VDS feature.

VDS is a lot of complexity and expense to add, just to tick
a "LACP Support" checkbox, however; if you don't also need its
other features....

5

ESX does support link aggregation, if by that is meant more than one Ethernet switch-to-ESX bundle, acting as a single logical pipe, and with stacked TOR switch configurations the bundles Ethernet links can connect to different TOR switches for redundancy. Nexus 1000V is better for network visibility and management, though.

6

I have to agree with this. Port-channels add no value with the way ESX load-balances. In fact, we had a few issues arise because of them and converted everything to native ESX LB.