We did cross-chassis port channels on 3750s for years. However, the new vCenter/ESX 5+ has this automatic link balancing thing. You setup the trunks all the same, no need for port-channels, and the vCenter host load-balances the vlans/hosts across the available links.
Kinda ugly from the switch side, and unpredictable, but seems to work. Would love to hear from someone with more experience doing this. We had a request from our systems group to do this on their new vCenter cluster and we've accomodated them, somewhat reluctantly, but so far no issues. Jeff On 9/19/2012 6:13 PM, Peter Rathlev wrote: > On Wed, 2012-09-19 at 14:48 -0700, Scott Voll wrote: >> If I have a VM physical server I can team two nics and then do a port >> channel on the switch. >> >> Can this be done if I have two switches? > That would require switches capable of cooperating more than usual. > Matts suggestions of 3750 Stackwise and Nexus vPCs cover the bases. > > You might not need MLAGs though. We run many stand-alone trunks from > 3750 and 3560 switches to VMware ESX hosts and let the vSwitch on the > host spread out the guests between these links and take care of > failover. It works really well and does not require any proprietary > protocol to work. > > Using this method means that no single guest can consume more that one > link, but deterministic hashing a la what Catalyst switches do has the > same limitation. > _______________________________________________ cisco-nsp mailing list [email protected] https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/cisco-nsp archive at http://puck.nether.net/pipermail/cisco-nsp/
