Home / server / Questions / 306920
In Process
Dennis Allen
Asked: 2011-09-01 09:30:25 +0800 CST

Link Aggregation with ESXi 4.1

  • 772

I am trying to setup Link Aggregation between a switch and an ESXi 4.1 host. When I perform all of the steps I think that I need, the switch shows the ports as being linked and that they have an avtive link state and have negotiated the speed and duplex mode, but I am not able to ping from the ESX host to the gateway or to connect to the ESX host remotely.

Hardware

  • Switch: Extream Networks Summit x350-48t (data sheet)
  • host NIC: Intel NC364T Quad Port (quick-specs)
  • host Server: HP ProLiant DL380 G5, (2) Xeon E5450, 36 GB RAM

Steps Taken

  1. Changed the vSwitch NIC Teaming to Load Balance based to "Route based on IP hash"
  2. Created a Link Aggregation Group on the switch by issuing command "enable sharing 1 grouping 1-4" (this sets 1 as the master port, and links ports 1,2,3,4 statically with address-based link aggregation by Layer 2)
  3. After viewing the status being reported as expected, ran a ping test from ESX host which failed
  4. Rebooted ESX host

Is there something obvious I am missing?

bonding vmware-esxi

1 Answers

  1. I'm not familiar with your switch but one gotcha on link aggregation is that it doesn't support LACP auto-negotiation so you have to configure the bonded ports statically on the switch. On a Cisco this is done by setting "no channel-protocol lacp" and "channel-group # mode on" rather than "channel-group # mode active" which seems to be an old style EtherChannel.

    • 1