VMware networking - PortChannel or not?

Posted by dunxd on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by dunxd
Published on 2010-12-22T16:11:08Z Indexed on 2010/12/22 16:56 UTC
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My ESX hosts each have 8 NICS.

I have set up 2 NICs for our iSCSI SAN - each is connected to a different SAN switch. 2 NICs are set up for vMotion and Service Console - these are each connected to a different core switch (ports are trunked with VLANs dedicated to vMotion and Management)

I now have four ports left over. Currently we have these set up each going into our default VLAN. Two NICs are connected to one core-switch and two are connected to the other. We decided to aggregate the connections to each switch - so they are teamed at the vswitch end, and port channelled at the physical switch end.

I am now reading that port channelling these connections is not particularly useful, perhaps even over complicating things.

Is there a particular problem with using port channels for VMware? What method provides the best balance between redundancy and performance?

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