LACP on vSphere 6.0 and HP

So you have decided to go with Enhanced LACP. Great choice, if you don’t plan to use auto-deploy and host profiles to do it. This my friend is a manual process, well at least for those that don’t do Python scripting. The focus of this article is to document how I got vSphere 6 and HP to behave with vSphere 6 Enhanced LACP.

The first step is to prepare the environment for LACP. If this configuration is taking place where host management, vCenter, and workloads that you want to actually not get disconnected it is recommended to configure this on a separate set of uplinks to the vDS or even a brand spanking new one. Yeah yeah I know, this is not always a possibility so the next best thing is to configure the vDS port groups attached to these things with the Route Based on IP Hash teaming / Load balancing.

Then you must configure the physical network. First I changed the way the switch does port-channel load balancing, then I create the port-channel.

ip load-sharing 2
trunk 17-18 Trk4 LACP

Now on the vSphere side…

I followed the instructions in the VMware vSphere 6.0 Documentation Center making the following choices..

Note these match the settings I used on the physical switch. The mode could be set to Passive as well since the physical switch is set to Active. Conversely if I set the physical switch to Passive I would need to set this LAG group to Active Mode. Holla!