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I have a virtual machine on my ESXi server with Ubuntu installed on it. The server has 4 1Gb/s ports that I want to use them all for my virtual machine.

An obvious (yet kinda stupid) way would be creating four vswitchs, four ethernet controllers for my VM, and bonding them in Ubuntu. But I wonder if there is a way to assign all 4 physical ports to a vswitch, and create a ethernet controller in my VM with 4Gb/s cap.

The problem is that whatever I do, I can't exceed 1Gb/s. Currently I've set the load balancing policy to Route based on IP hash. And in the graphs, I can see that all four of the physical ports are actually used, but to one fourth of their potential.

Also the ethernet controller in the Ubuntu (installed on the VM), shows that eth0 has a 10000 Mb/s bandwidth, so I don't think the problem is there.

P.S. If there is anything wrong with the question, or the terms I used in it, comment and I will edit it. thanks!

Mohammadreza MontazeriShatoori
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    LACP doesn't work like that... for a variety of reasons. What are you trying to connect *to*? – ewwhite Aug 05 '14 at 20:20
  • @ewwhite I'm sorry, I don't get what you mean by "What are you trying to connect to?". It's supposed to be a CDN server. I want to reach 4 Gb/s outgoing traffic. – Mohammadreza MontazeriShatoori Aug 05 '14 at 20:25
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    What type of physical switch are you connected to? Does the switch have LACP/802.3ad enabled? – ewwhite Aug 05 '14 at 20:33
  • @ewwhite Unfortunately I don't have a quick access to the physical switch itself, and I don't know if LACP/802.3ad is enabled on it. I need to send a request to data center to check it for me, definitely will take a day or two. – Mohammadreza MontazeriShatoori Aug 05 '14 at 20:49

3 Answers3

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If you want true link aggregation, as opposed to simple failover, this needs to be supported by the switch you are connecting your server to; this is called an etherchannel in Cisco speak, I don't know how other vendors call it.

You need to configure four ports on the switch for link aggregation, and then create a single vSwitch in ESXi and bond all four physical adapters to it; run four cables from the server to the switch (making sure you use the switch ports you configured to work together), and you're done.

If your switch doesn't support link aggregation, then only a single connection will be active at any given time, the other ones will only be used for failover.

Massimo
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  • This is only correct for incomming traffic. Outgoing traffic can be balanced across more than one connection to get the combined bandwidth. – Christopher Perrin Aug 05 '14 at 20:32
  • @Massimo The problem is (as I mentioned in the question) that the graphs show that all the links are actually active and getting used after I set the `Route based on IP hash` settings, but the sum output does not exceed 1 Gb/s. – Mohammadreza MontazeriShatoori Aug 05 '14 at 20:32
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    Where are you sending traffic to? If you're sending traffic to a single destination, it will be routed through a single link. And if f.e. all your destinations are behind a single 1 Gb/b link, that will act as a bottleneck. – Massimo Aug 05 '14 at 20:40
  • @Massimo No. There are several targets, and I know that all the links are actually getting used (from the graph in the Performance tab of VSphere Client). – Mohammadreza MontazeriShatoori Aug 05 '14 at 20:47
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A more specific limitation is at play here. VMware vSphere editions below the Enterprise licensing level do NOT support LACP. And even then, LACP is only available on the Distributed Switch, not Standard vSwitch.

Can you provide more detail on what you're connecting to and why 4Gbps throughput is necessary? Are you encountering limitations already? Have you measured the performance?

ewwhite
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  • Unfortunately I don't have access to the physical switch itself. It is a CDN server, and I need the 4Gbps for the outgoing traffic. About the performance measuring, I mentioned the graphs in my question. They show that the traffic is divided between the four switches, but the sum still doesn't exceed 1 Gbps. – Mohammadreza MontazeriShatoori Aug 05 '14 at 20:45
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If your 4 uplinks are equally used your config should be correct. (Although the switch really should know what you're doing!)

It's interesting that you get a combined bandwidth of more or less exactly 1 Gbit/s. As far as I understand you're connected to only one physical switch, right? A shot in the dark: Maybe it has only one (active) 1GbE uplink?

Mario Lenz
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