Objective 2.3 – Deploy and Maintain Scalable Virtual Networking

Knowledge - Identify VMware NIC Teaming policies
LoadBalancing Policies

• Route based on the originating port ID: Choose an uplink based on the virtual port where the traffic entered the virtual switch.
• Route based on an IP hash: Choose an uplink based on a hash of the source and destination IP addresses of each packet. For non-IP packets, whatever is at those offsets is used to compute the hash.
• Route based on a source MAC hash: Choose an uplink based on a hash of the source Ethernet.
• Use explicit failover order: Always use the highest order uplink from the list of Active adapters which passes failover detection criteria.
• Route based on physical NIC load (Only available on Distributed Switch): Choose an uplink based on the current loads of physical NICs.

 

Network Failover Detection  Policies

• Link Status Only
• Beacon Probing 

Knowledge - Identify common network protocols
There are many network protocols see link of some

Skills and Abilities - Understand the NIC Teaming failover types and related physical network settings
By default, fail-back policy is enabled. That is, if a physical Ethernet adapter that had failed comes back online, the adapter is returned to active duty immediately, displacing the standby adapter that took over its slot. This policy is in effect when the Rolling Failover setting is No.

If the primary physical adapter is experiencing intermittent failures, this setting can lead to frequent changes in the adapter in use. The physical switch thus sees frequent changes in MAC address, and the physical switch port may not accept traffic immediately when a particular adapter comes online. To minimize delays, disable the following on the physical switch:

• Spanning tree protocol (STP) — disable STP on physical network interfaces connected to the ESX Server host. For Cisco-based networks, enable port fast mode for access interfaces or portfast trunk mode for trunk interfaces (saves about 0 seconds during initialization of the physical switch port).
• Etherchannel negotiation, such as PAgP or LACP — must be disabled because they are not supported.
• Trunking negotiation (saves about four seconds).

An alternative approach is to set Rolling Failover to Yes. With this setting, a failed adapter is left inactive even after recovery until another currently active adapter fails, requiring its replacement. Using the Failover Order policy setting, you specify how to distribute the work load for the physical Ethernet adapters on the host. You can place some adapters in active use; designate a second group as standby adapters for use in failover situations; and designate other adapters as unused, excluding them from NIC teaming.

Using the Notify Switches policy setting, you determine how ESX Server communicates with the physical switch in the event of a failover. If you select Yes, whenever a virtual Ethernet adapter is connected to the virtual switch or whenever that virtual Ethernet adapter’s traffic would be routed over a different physical Ethernet adapter in the team due to a failover event, a notification is sent out over the network to update the lookup tables on physical switches. In almost all cases, this is desirable for the lowest latency when a failover occurs.

Skills and Abilities - Determine and apply Failover settings
 

Skills and Abilities - Configure explicit failover to conform with VMware best practices

Skills and Abilities - Configure port groups to properly isolate network traffic
Useful VMware link