vSphere — mtellin.com

Port Channels, ESXi 4.1 and the Management Network

Now that I have a few of our ESX hosts upgraded from ESX 4 to ESXi 4.1 I’ve noticed something about the Load Balancing policy on vSwitch0. Like a lot of people we have multiple GbE connections that go into vSwitch0 (at least on these specific hosts), as usual when you first install ESXi it will set the Load Balancing policy to be based on the Virtual Port ID.

Next I configured the other two adapters that are on this system into vSwitch0

Now I can see in the properties of the vSwitch that vmnic0, vmnic1 and vmnic2 are all listed as active adapters.

But when I go to Management Network it only shows two of the adapters as active and the third adapter is listed as unused.

In ESX I would set the vSwitch to use a Load Balancing policy of IP Hash to work with our port channel we have configured on our switches and it would also change the Load Balancing policy on the included portgroups.

In ESXi it changes the Load Balancing policy for the Virtual Machine network to IP Hash but it does not change the Load Balancing policy for the Management Network, this stays configured as based on Virtual Port ID.

VM Network shows as IP Hash and has all 3 adapters configured as active same as the vSwitch configuration

However the Management Network still shows Virtual Port ID with 2 NICs active and 1 unused

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NetApp Virtual Storage Console (VSC) for vSphere

NetApp released v1.0 of their VSC for VMware vSphere, VSC is a plugin for vCenter which allows anyone connecting with the VI Client to access it. What is nice about the tool is it allows you to see an overview of your storage environment and ensure things are configured inline with NetApp’s recommended best practices and, if they aren’t, allows you to set the recommended values.

Click on the pictures for a larger view, you can see it adds a new tab called NetApp when the ESX server is selected. In my environment we are using all NFS for storage to the ESX boxes, so in the next screen I show the ‘Storage Details – NAS’ option:

What is nice about this view is I can quickly see I need to make a couple changes on the NetApp, the ucode settings should be set to on and the atime update should be set to on as well.

As mentioned before, there are also ESX specific settings that should be set to follow best practices, by right clicking on the ESX hosts listed in the NetApp tab (see 1st picture) there is an option to ‘Set Recommended Values’

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Finally you can also set guest timeout settings, under the Tools option there is a download link for the .iso for Windows and Linux guests. For some reason in my environment I couldn’t download the ISO from this page – if you have the same issue you can find it in the Program Files\NetApp\Virtual Storage Console\webapps\public folder.

Once you load the ISO in the VM, double clicking on the CD drive will ask you if you want to add the info in the windows_gos_timeout.reg file to the registry.

While I only have NFS mounted storage, you can also use the VSC to check things like: