[c-nsp] VMware teaming Nic's and multiple switches

[Peter Rathlev]

On Wed, 2012-09-19 at 14:48 -0700, Scott Voll wrote:
> If I have a VM physical server I can team two nics and then do a port
> channel on the switch.
> 
> Can this be done if I have two switches?

That would require switches capable of cooperating more than usual.
Matts suggestions of 3750 Stackwise and Nexus vPCs cover the bases.

You might not need MLAGs though. We run many stand-alone trunks from
3750 and 3560 switches to VMware ESX hosts and let the vSwitch on the
host spread out the guests between these links and take care of
failover. It works really well and does not require any proprietary
protocol to work.

Using this method means that no single guest can consume more that one
link, but deterministic hashing a la what Catalyst switches do has the
same limitation.

-- 
Peter