Nic Teaming with QNAP & ESXi v5.x

[tomf]

I don't understand Nic Teaming yet, so trying to understand.

I've read as much as I can find on this topic, but it generally says I need to have a switch that supports the Nic Teaming to have it really work. But then I've read some articles that don't mention that at all.

So I'm wondering if setting my QNAP TS-459U+ to Nic Teaming will do anything for my setup, with an unmanaged switch?

If so, what is the best config settings for it?

Thanks,

~ Tommy

[P3R]

The only settings that are usable with a non-trunking-aware switch are Balance-tlb, Balance-alb and Active Backup (Active Backup only provides fault tolerance). Personally I use Balance-tlb or Active Backup but I have other bottlenecks so I don't really notice any performance difference between them. YMMV.

This is the documentation for the feature.
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[geowrian]

I know this is a late response, but I'm just seeing this now. If you tested this out and it worked for you, then please post! I'd love to confirm your setup worked.

In one environment that I deal with, we do active/active on the ESX side of things and use balance-alb or balance-tlb on the QNAP. This worked fine for us. On the ESX side of things, we also created multiple vmkernels (on different subnets) for each physcial NIC and used a distributed switch for load balancing based on NIC load. It's working fine with full redundancy on connections (one to each switch), and getting 1gbps per datastore per host (2 x 1GbE NICs on the storage side per host).

Balance-rr can also work well, as can LACP in ESX with 5.1, but it requires managed switches that support those capabilities. If you want redundancy, then the switch also needs to be stackable to support cross-switch LAGs. Both options would generally do a little better load balancing job (or at least have more control), but the switches are much more complex. The other policies noted above work on pretty much any switch without switch configuration.