Hello,
we are migrating our vsphere network configuration from vStandard to vDistributed Switch and during our tests we are facing some configuration issues and at least some "best practice" problems.
At first, a short introduction of our test environment:
Location A and B, each: 2 ESXi 5.5 hosts, 4x 1GB NICs connected to 2 trunked switches.
Defined VLANs (trunks) for ManagementNetwork, vMotion, VM traffic
First of all we "just" migrated our VSS to VDS inclusive all portgroups without any obvious issues and errors. After enabling the health check we get the following Alarms a few times a day:
Teaming configuration in the vSphere Distributed Switch on host hostname does not match the physical switch configuration in ha-datacenter. Detail: No loadbalance_ip teaming policy matches
After some research we found the following VM KB article: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2057667
This leads us to some discussions with our network team and they defined portchannel groups for all NICs of each ESXi host. We changed the VDS settings and activated LACP (passive) for the uplinks, set all Uplinks as Active (for all portgroups) and changed the loadbalancing policy to "Route based on IP hash ..." as described in the kb article above and further kb articles.
These changes helped us concerning the vDS health check errors and we did not get any VDS teaming/failover errors and warnings again!!!
So we continue our research and we found some references and "best practice tips" which do not recommend our LACP configuration for "VMotion" because of the "route based on ip hash" load balancing policy, which is not "load aware". LBT and "Route based on originating virtual port" is recommanded. But on one side, if we configure portchannel groups we have to use the "ip hash" policy and on the other side without the portchannel groups and the "....originating virtual ip port" load balancing we get the health check errors.
Are there any ideas how we can realize our configuration without LACP (portchanneling) and health check errors? How should we configure the physical switch ports and/or VDS!?
Thank you in advance!!!
Manuel