How to configure NIC teaming on free VMWare ESXi 5.5?

Question

There are articles online that describe this process for paid version of ESXi via VDS. My understanding is that VDS is not available on free ESXi version. We, however, do not need fully blown HA on our ESXi host, but what I want to achieve is simple NIC failover so that if one NIC or physical switch has failed our ESXi host would automagically switch to use another NIC (which is plugged into a different switch).

Is there a way to achieve that on free version of ESXi?

Solution

Our configuration is simple, crude even, but its effective for our purposes: all vSwitches (one for each VLAN) get all NICs. Each Host has four (4) NICs. The NICs are connected in pairs to two switches (Juniper EX4300s in our case). NICs 1 and 2 go to Switch A. NICs 3 and 4 go to Switch B. All switch ports have all the VLANs for that host (or rather all the hosts on that vCenter cluster), right now I think that's a total of 5 VLANs?

Bottom line, I yanked power completely from a switch during our initial testing phase of our build-out and with the exception of a few dropped packets while things reoriented themselves, it was seamless. No LACP necessary, etc. VMware's NIC teaming handled the aggregation and layer 2 with as much grace as I'd expect. The Virtual Networking Concepts PDF is a good, easy, fast read and gives you a great overview of vSwitches and how the different teaming policies behave.

Since our switches are in a virtual chassis, I can LACP across them, so where I can, I do use LACP links with half going to switch A and half going to switch B. I spent a lot of time trying to sort out a way to get this going on ESXi like you are trying to do because there was no way we were paying for Enterprise Plus to get VDS. In the end, our solution works as well as I could hope, on Standard none-the-less.

Comments

[Alexey Kamenskiy]

That's right. It IS possible. Though there is no clear instructions to be found online, so the question is not whether it is possible, but how to do it as I can't seem to find relevant options in vSphere client.

[JimNim]

Is it not simply listed in the properties of the vSwitch? I'd expect that the settings for a vmkernel port to default w/ 1 active/primary and 1 standby NIC if 2 NICs were in the vSwitch when the vmkernel port was added. Unless I'm just missing something... This should be no different than standard vSwitch behavior of paid ESX versions.

[JimNim]

Also... If the question is "how?" then you may want to edit your question to specify that, e.g. "How can this be achieved on a free version..."

[JimNim]

Here's a doc explaining the process for 4.1 - from what I can see, it has barely changed (if at all) up to 5.5 - pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-4-esx-vcenter/index.jsp?topic=/…

[Alexey Kamenskiy]

To be honest I am not so experienced with VMWare. We got two 5.5 ESXi hosts that were already configured and it does not have failover configuration at the moment. There are 2 separate vSwitch (0 and 1) and each NIC assigned to separate vSwitch. So if I just follow these instructions - it does not give me anything and I am reluctant to remove existing vSwitch as this is a working production environment. Any advice on this situation?