VMware vSphere: Networking Configuring LACP

Why LACP?: To get as much bandwidth as possible between your ESXi hosts and your physical switches in the data center, it's common to use LACP. If a single 1GB ethernet adapter was not big enough, you could connect two or three 1GB ethernet adapters.

Definition: Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) is a method for combining multiple Ethernet links into a single logical link.

Requirements:

1. Your physical switches have to not only support LACP (or channels), they have to be configured for it.

2. You must be using the vSphere Distributed Switch.

3. LAG on the physcial switch, has to be using the same hashing algorithm

This will walk you through configuring LACP on vDS given design parameters

1. Go to vSphere > Network

2. Select a Switch (We selected the "Storage" Switch)

3. Go to Configure > Settings > LACP

4. Click "New"

5. Select the mode

Passive (default): LACP packets, initiated by the physical switch.

Active: LAG ports from the vSphere host, initiate the LACP connection.

6. Select the load balancing mode and click "OK"

1. The load balancing mode on the LAG, needs to match what's on the physical switch.

We haven't assigned any NICs to the LAG

7. You'll need to "Migrate network traffic to lags"

8. This brings up a wizard, that tells us the steps

9. Go up to the actions menu and select "Manage Distributed Port Group"

10. In this example, we select "teaming and failover". Click "Next"

11. Select any Port Groups that we want to configure. In this case, it's the "Storage Management" DV Port Group. Click "Next".

12. Move the LAG (lag1) ...

... and configure it as the Standby Port Group. Click "Next".

14. It warns us that this is only used during the migration process.

16. Click "Finish"

17. Reassign physical adapters of the host to the LAG ports.

18. Click "Add and Manage Hosts"

19. Select "Manage host networking"

20. Select the hosts that are a part of this cluster

21. Select the NICs that you want to migrate.

22. The three VM NICS, one from each of the hosts that are now page of this cluster, can now be assigned to the lag1-0 group

23. Click next

24. Click next

25. Click next

26. Click finish, to migrate the physical adapters to the LAG

27. Set the LAG to be the only active uplink, on the DV Port Group.

28. Manage distributed Port Groups. Select Teaming and Failover

29. Select the Port Group (Management-Storage)

30. You're going to move the LAG (lag1)

31. Move up the LAG to be "Active uplinks"

32. Here's it's moved up

33. Select the old uplinks

34. Click move down

35. They are now on the bottom

36. Click "Finish"

37. You can see that the new "lag1" is active

38. Let's take a look at our topology

39. There is only one from each physical host. You'd wanna add at least one more as that's the entire point. At least 2 from each host, bonded together.