Link aggregation - am I doing it right?

[Jim82]

Dear community,

I've setup Link Aggregation to the best of my knowledge, but I have some questions I'm hoping you guru's can answer.

Main problem/concern: Even though I should be having the equivalent of ~3Gbit/s network connection towards my LAN, I can only squeeze out exactly 1Gbit/s.

Please see the attached pictures of my network config in ESXi.

Questions:

1) According my screendumps, does everything look ok?

2) Do I need to tick the boxes in the "NIC Teaming" tab on the Virtual Machine Port Group also(see picture 4 below), or is this inherited from the vSwitch?

3) Using a VM with VMXNET3 adapter, I can only get 1Gbit/s throughput when testing, is this normal?

System info:

ESXi 5.1.0, 914609

Supermicro X9-SCM-F

16GB ECC

Xeon E1220

2 x Onboard NIC's

1 x Dual Port PCIe x4 NIC

1 x NIC for mgmt

3 x NIC for VM's (Cabled up to my Cisco SG-200 switch and setup as LAG(without LACP)

Any help would be much appreciated.

Best regards

Jim

[a_p_]

To be able to make full use of LACP you need to use vDS with ESXi 5.1. For other versions/editions take a look at http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1004048 for the limitations.

André

[mcowger]

How are you testing, exactly?  This can provide a ton of insight.

[Jim82]

Thanks André for your tip.

Although I only have a single ESXi host, will vDS work? Also are you saying that it's not possible to reach more than 1Gbit/s throughput using a normal vSwitch with IP hash teaming?

Thanks for you assistance so far.

Jim

[Jim82]

Hi Matt,

Good point.

I have an HP Microserver with Windows 2012 on it. 3 NIC's and setup for LACP. This should provide approximately 3Gbit/s speeds.

I'm then copying a testfile from a W2K8 VM with VMXNET3 vNIC. The testfile in located on a SSD.

Thanks

Jim

[mcowger]

Your test is insufficient.

IP hash load balancing means that any given IP hash (.e.g connection between 2 machines) will only go over a single card.  To effectively use multiple cards with IP hash, you need MULTIPLE clients with different IP addresses to hit a combined 3GBit.  Any single connection will be limited 1 GBit.

[Jim82]

Thanks Matt,

That gave a lot of insight, I'll try testing some more.

BR Jim