On Fri, 12 Nov 2010, Edward Ned Harvey wrote: > AFAIK, since lacp only creates the ability to have multiple streams that > are all independently able to go a single wire speed... That wouldn't > work for this case, would it? Meaning ... You're not going to be able > to access a single VM datastore vmdk file etc at 4G speeds... At best, > you might be able to access multiple individual machines at 1G speeds. > And I have a guess about whether the multiple individual machines will > work too... > > Right?
Right. It's a little more complicated, but I recall years ago when I had an Oracle server (Sun Enterprise E4500) and a NetApp (FAS960). We used Sun Trunking to team 4 1Gb ethernet ports together to our Cisco 6509 infrastructure. Then we used NetApp's vif (virtual interfaces) to create a 4x1Gb aggregated connection to the same Cisco infrastructure. The problem was that while we could round-robin traffic out of the Sun, and round-robin traffic out of the NetApp, the Cisco had to pick a path. The way Cisco does the hashing algorithm, it's based on some combination of source and destination addresses that includes MAC. So, once it picks a single path, the 4Gb traffic coming into the Cisco would be 1Gb going out -- it would not round-robin the traffic. We solved that by breaking down the port teams and having 4 single 1Gb connections from the Sun and NetApp. We then separated the Oracle files onto four mounted paths (based on recommendations from our database team for which data, index and log files should be separated vs. which could be on the same path). We effectively got 2.5-3 Gb out of the configuration, and we were happy. In your case, your ESX host is going to see a given NFS-mounted datastore down a single 1Gb link, even with teaming/aggregation on both ends. Splitting that traffic could be a nightmare of administration, so you're probably better off following the other road and trying to get cost-effective 10Gb. -Adam _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
