Configuration of VM Host with dual NICs

[RICHARD MESSINGER]

I have a customer that has an HP VM environment that is connecting to Catalyst 3850 switches.  He was told that instead of using Etherchannel and LACP to bind two interfaces together that it was better to use VM's round robin for the configuration on the nics.

This seems odd and not quite right when it comes to the utilization on the server and would lead to table thrashing on the switch.

Can anyone point to if this is a good idea or to a Cisco Best Practice document.

Thanks

[Kirk J]

Greetings.

Round Robin is not a term/option that VMware networking uses, but is used for NMP/Storage Multipathing. The default teaming algorithm (originating port ID) only balances outbound traffic, while the inbound traffic will come in on one port.  See https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1004088 and https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&docTypeID=DT_KB_1_1&externalId=1001938

The only time you don't want to use switch assisted teaming (LACP, 802.3ad, etc) is if you host's NICs in the team aren't really connected to the same upstream logical switch (UCSM, certain IBM blade enclosures), in addition to some iSCSI best practices, where you will use the NMP/MPIO for failover.

Thanks,

Kirk..