In my previous Post, I tried to find out how support for LACP in vSphere 5.5 has changed the design consideration for vMotion Network. One has to decide between Multi-NIC vMotion and Link Aggregation.
After some search on Internet and talking to my friends in virtualization domain, I was referred to this excellent post from Chris Wahl (VCDX -104) on his blog wahlnetwork.com
Not only does this post talk about this in depth but also the comments posted helped me understand the concept and its pros and cons even better.
Multi-NIC vMotion when used with LBT or Load Based Teaming is still a clear winner when compared to Link Aggregation for vMotion networks.
Few reasons for this are summarized here:
- A LAG can only perform traffic distribution. Even if NIC is saturated.
- LBT, on the other hand, actively examines traffic on a vSwitch. It is aware of the load on NIC which helps it avoid sending traffic on saturated NIC.
Thoughts ?
So LBT is much better to load balance traffic in this case.
That doesn't mean that LACP is bad and should not be used in vSphere designs. It perhaps has a different use case to suit its functionality. For eg: NFS based Storage.
I will post the pros and cons and use cases for when to use link aggregations in a different post.
Till then keep networking. Cheers !
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