LACP on vSphere 6.0 and Cisco

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 Cisco IOS to behave with vSphere 6 Enhanced LACP.

GUID-2F8C5C5F-F4AC-4DB7-90BC-963EFB87B1CD-high

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.

iphash

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 and configure it, finally configure the ports.

port-channel load-balance src-dst-ip

interface Port-channel4
switchport trunk encapsulation dot1q
switchport mode trunk
spanning-tree portfast trunk

interface GigabitEthernet1/0/17
switchport trunk encapsulation dot1q
switchport trunk allowed vlan 20,100,201-203,241
switchport mode trunk
channel-protocol lacp
channel-group 4 mode active
spanning-tree portfast trunk

interface GigabitEthernet1/0/18
switchport trunk encapsulation dot1q
switchport trunk allowed vlan 20,100,201-203,241
switchport mode trunk
channel-protocol lacp
channel-group 4 mode active
spanning-tree portfast trunk

Now on the vSphere side…

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

lag

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!

goodvds

REF:

Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) with VMware vSphere 5.1.x, 5.5.x and 6.0.x (2120663)

 

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