NIC teaming on Hyper-V

[Mike Davis]

I have a new Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 install. It has 2 integrated NICs and 4 NICs on a separate card. There are currently 4 VMs on the host and more will probably be added. The network switches are just a basic Linksys and will probably be replaced soon.

Does it make any sense to set up NIC teaming on the host? This is more of a case of how to best set up the hardware in hand than what hardware is needed for the load. In all honesty I can't see any one VM using more than 1Gb/s, so there isn't a real performance goal.

[travisdh1]

Nope.

Now go enjoy your weekend!

[art_of_shred]

Sounds like extra work for nothing, to me.

[JaredBusch]

Yes, it makes sense to setup teaming. because the default teaming in Hyper-V does not expect the switch to be smart enough to handle it.

I think i posted here on it. let me go look.

[JaredBusch]

@JaredBusch said in NIC teaming on Hyper-V:

Yes, it makes sense to setup teaming. because the default teaming in Hyper-V does not expect the switch to be smart enough to handle it.

I think i posted here on it. let me go look.

Looks like I only posted about hating VMQ
https://mangolassi.it/topic/8358/i-hate-vmq

That was after I had teaming setup.

[JaredBusch]

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj130847(v=wps.630).aspx

All you do is used this command New-NetLbfoTeam –Name Team1 –TeamMembers NIC1,NIC2, obviously tweaked for your preference.

Then you make you vSwitch. If you already have your vSwitch setup, make a team with the ports NOT on the vSwitch, move the vSwitch to the team and then add the final NIC to the team.

By default Hyper-V uses this switch -TeamingMode SwitchIndependant so you do not have to specify it. This means no single connection can go over 1gbps, but with multiple connections, you will get > 1gbps total.

[thwr]

@JaredBusch said in NIC teaming on Hyper-V:

Then you make you vSwitch. If you already have your vSwitch setup, make a team with the ports NOT on the vSwitch, move the vSwitch to the team and then add the final NIC to the team.

Not much to add here. SwitchIndependent mode is a big one on Hyper-V. Sure, Windows can easily use LACP and other means, but what if you want to use two or more uplink switches for redundancy? LACP can't handle this and there is just a handful of proprietary protocols that can. SwitchIndependent mode is doing exactly this by "load balancing" VMs and Host traffic between the available links and failover in case something goes south.

This way, like @JaredBusch said above, you can have LACP-like functionality (max single port speed for a single traffic source) over multiple inexpensive switches. In fact, the switch doesn't know anything about that type of teaming, you could even use unmanaged switches (but really, don't do that)

My hosts are running in this mode.