Re: How does my network configuration look? (i.e. do I understand ESXi networking?)

sofakng wrote:

If I removed IP Hash and had one vSwitch with two NICs, and then assigned to virtual NICs to a VM, would they each get "assigned" a physical NIC or could both virtual NICs attempt to route out the same physical NIC?

 

Again if 2 vNICS are there then it will pass through 2 pNICS, but if there are other vms using those pnics then congestion will happen, and if you use ip hash or port id policy this is the case. That is why LBT comes in to picture, this will ensure that a vm traffic can utilize a maximum pnic bandwith, if other vm traffic comes, it will transfer to remaining pnics thus the original vm traffic wont get affected. that is it will avoid congestion.

 

Load Based Teaming is a very good option, however it is as you say only available on Enterprise Plus licencing and it will also never give a single VM more bandwidth than one physical NIC. If the goal is to really maximize the bandwidth for single VMs then IP Hash has to be used.

OK - I was going to get an evaluation of Enterprise Plus but it won't give a VM more than one NIC of bandwidth then it won't work for me.

LBT only ensure, that a vm will get maximum bandwidth of a pnic. That is why it is widely used, in the high network intensive application. As per the vmware architecture, once a network session is established, between a vm and the out side network, it will only flow through one vnic, one pnic and one pswitch, other teaming policy is not aware of the pnic congestion happening inside the pnic. So the inented vm will get a reduced bandwidth. This only applies if many vms share a pnic.

 

So in short, LBT is best in a multiple vm environment, and ip hash will be the best if only one vm shares 2 pnics. in the nfs, iscsi cases we can use this.

 

 

My goal is fairly simple though... I have a file server VM and I want my clients (non-VM, remote network machines) to have as much throughput as possible.  For example, if two client machines are copying files I want them each to get full gigabit speed from the server...

 

 

 

again in real world, i never saw 24/7 time all the pnics are used 100 %, once again - if the file server vm is dedicated with a vswitch and 2 pnics, then it will be better to use ip hash, but as mentioned by Rickard - IP hash will give more bandwidth if the clients ip addresses will eventually create different hashes, and it will be difficult to manage..so again IP hash will eventually give less bandwidth. if you ensure all the clients IP give o and 1 hashes it will be good.

 

So i really recommend to use LBT in this case.