Hi,
I have two physical servers that I'm setting up with ESXi. Each server has eight physcial NICs. My plan is, on each server to use:
- 2 for management - connected to vSwitch0
- 2 for VMotion - connected to vSwitch1
- 2 for iSCSI - connected to vSwitch2 (I'll be using a SAN)
- 2 for VM network access - connected to vSwitch3
For every pair, one cable would be plugged into switch1 and the second would be plugged into switch2.
The switches are HP A5120 that are stacked into one big switch with IRF. i.e. I have one 'big' switch that, if one of the two physical switches dies or gets powered off, would cause the 'big' switch to lose half its ports. This way, all four networks should keep running even if one switch 'dies'.
All the information I have found online says that ESXi can have two physcial NICs attached to a single vSwitch and that it can then do clever stuff for redundancy (in case a physical NIC dies) and load balanacing.
However, while all the guides tell me how to configure it on ESXi, I'm still not sure if I should aggregate the two cables at on the physical switches.
So, my questions are:
1) In order to get NIC redundancy and/or load balancing working in ESXi, do I have to aggregate the two physical ports on the switch(s) that connect to the the two physical ports that connect to the vSwitch?
2) With NIC teaming, I see, for the management network, how having one active adapter and one standby adapter works fine, but, for the iSCSI network, wouldn't I want both adapters to be active to double the bandwidth?
Any insight would be much appreciated.
Thanks.