VMWare vSS EtherChannel options with Cisco Nexus 5K

[gsidhu]

Hi

Client has VMWare ESXi 5.5 servers running Virtual Standard Switch (vSS).

My understanding is that vSS does not support LACP (and that vDS is required for LACP support).

Are there any other EtherChannel options on the Nexus 5k switch that will support Active/Active NIC teaming with VMWare ESXi vSS?

Thanks

[Dragan Ilic]

I think you can go with vSS and static "ON" etherchannel (ie "channel-group X mode on")...i'm not sure only if Nexus support ON mode on etherchanneling...

More on:

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1004048

Here you will see that you can go without LACP with Cisco - again not sure if Nexus support this specific config...

BR,

Dragan

[Peter Koltl]

Active-active does not imply LACP. LACP ensures that LAG members stay in the group only if they are able to negotiate group membership with the remote peer thus preventing stale links wrongly connected to a remote port not part of the LAG.

Load balancing requires that either peer balances the egress frames across all links. Cisco is able to do that even without LACP. So is vSphere if you configure it properly.

[gsidhu]

I did some further research...

By changing the channel mode from ‘active’ to ‘on’ as Dragan suggested you are effectively using static EtherChannels where a  protocol is not used for forming the EtherChannel (hence this turns off LACP). Nexus 5K switches support this mode.

Also in this case the ESXi VMware vSS was set up to use static channel.

The following Cisco document provides more details:

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/switches/datacenter/nexus5000/sw/layer2/421_n2_1/b_Cisco_n5k_layer2_config_gd_rel_421_N2_1/Cisco_n5k_layer2_config_gd_rel_421_N2_1_chapter7.pdf