Managing vNICs and vHBA's

[SteveT12]

How can you tell what vNIC or vHBA is actually being used in UCS? How can you tell what device is primary and what is secondly?  Also, how do you see the usage?

[Kirk J · Accepted solution]

Your questions might need some more clarification.....

Generally comparing MAC addresses at the OS level, with the vnics in the service profile, is a good way to confirm which vnic is really which eth or VMNIC device at the OS level.

Not sure about the "primary and what is secondly" question, unless you mean active and standby terminology for ESXi teaming settings.

Using the MAC address will help ID which vnic is which VMNIC.

Kirk...

[SteveT12]

Hi Kirk,

You're right.. definitely needs clarification.  Lets say I for simplicity's sake I deploy 2 vNICs to my service profile (vNIC0 and vNIC1- on same VLAN). The first one, vNIC0, is connected to Fabric Interface-A path and vNIC1 is connected to Fabric Interconnect-B path.   Then I deploy the service profile to a physical server and make it a VMware ESXi host.  I set both vNICs as active in VMware.  Would VMware "round-robin" to balance the traffic across both interfaces? 

[Kirk J · Accepted solution]

Your question is a VMware ESXi teaming question.

The default teaming setting (for multiple 'active' VMNICs) is 'Route based on originating virtual port'

"Select an uplink based on the virtual port IDs on the switch. After the virtual switch selects an uplink for a virtual machine or a VMkernel adapter, it always forwards traffic through the same uplink for this virtual machine or VMkernel adapter."

From guestVM count, yes, it would try to evenly distribute guestVM 'originating virtual port' connections across the available physical uplinks.  This method doesn't adjust for actual usage/utilization, so you can still have unbalanced mapping where 3 heavy talkers are on one link and 3 light talkers are on the other.

esxtop (with 'n' option) command from an ESXi host ssh connection is a good way to see which VM's nics are assigned to which uplink.

Kirk...