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This might sound like a silly question, but do I need to configure LAG settings on both ends? Currently running a single host with ESXi 6 (no vCenter), with three 1Gbps NICs in the vSwitch. The NIC Teaming Policy is set to Notify switches, but I haven't configured anything in the physical switch yet.

Here's the vSwitch topology Regarding the switch, it's a older Cisco 24-port Gigabit switch but it gets the job done. I already set two LAG connections, one two another identical switch in another office and another one for our NAS. Heres' the setup The ESXi host's RAID controller and disks are able to push about 250-300MB/s, and I have verify this by running ATTO from within the VMs. The VMs have VMXNET3 adapters connected at 10Gbps, but I'm not getting much over 80-110MB/s of throughout from the VMs to our NAS. The NAS is able to handle over 200MB/s, so what am I doing wrong?

NAS (RAID 5 capable of over 200MB/s) 2x 1Gbps NICs LAG > Cisco Switch > 3x 1Gbps links to the ESXi host (RAID capable of 300MB/sec)

The performance is practically the same if I use the VMXNET3 or the E1000 adapter in the VMs, which points to something not correctly configured somewhere else.

Any help will be appreciated. Thanks!

Guille Avalos
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My advice is not to use LAG of any sort unless you're using a VMware distributed switch and have the right licensing environment to take advantage of it.

Single-host ESXi static link-aggregation is not going to do what you think it will. If you need more bandwidth, move to 10GbE networking. You're not going to be able to get more than 1Gb from the setup you have.

If the goal is failover, the ESXi NIC teaming/failover defaults are sufficient.

ewwhite
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  • Thank you. You're not the first one to suggest not to use it, probably too convoluted to set up anyway. I did however read up on iSCSI and multipath, which should be supported by our NAS since it's VMware certified. – Guille Avalos Jun 20 '16 at 16:34