BE7K Built in LAN1 and LAN2 Ports

[bacase]

We are trying to setup some redundancy for our BE7K's (BE7H-M5-K9) links by using a mix of ports on the motherboard and PCI cards as recommended in the Install Guide.

The install guide lists the three ports on the motherboard as "Dual 1-Gb/10-Gb Ethernet ports (LAN1 and LAN2)" and a "1-Gb Ethernet dedicated management port" but between what's reported in CIMC and ESXI we are only seeing the management port and one other, so 2 ports total. We do also see our NIC cards in the PCI slots.  And in CIMC under Inventory > Network Adapters, labeled as "Intel X550 LOM" I only see 2 mac addresses (rather than 3 as I would expect), unless it's a pick one and both of these ports share a mac address.

Does anyone know if the LAN1 and LAN2 ports can be used at the same time?  Or is it pick one or the other?

[Elliot Dierksen]

That is in the load balancing item in teaming & failover section of the networking port group in ESXi. That is a pretty easy Google for a better description than I can write. The most common options are 'route based on originating virtual port' which would use both ports (if they are both assigned as uplinks) and split the vm traffic between them, or 'route based on IP hash'. The IP hash option requires the switch ports to be configured as a port channel.

[Nithin Eluvathingal]

You cannot use the Management interface along with the LAN 1 and LAN 2 ports; the management port is purely for CIMC.

CIMC can be configured as dedicated, using the management port, or shared with the LOM port, in which case it uses LAN 1 or LAN 2 for communications, not the management port.

For VM redundancy, you can use the LAN 1 and LAN 2 ports. If there are additional NIC cards installed on the server, you should use those.

You can use LAN 1 and 2 simultaneously, either in active-standby or active-active configurations. These settings can be configured from VMware. You can also bundle the ports as an EtherChannel, but the other end must be configured similarly. All these configurations can be done from VMware, and you can find numerous articles online detailing the process