Single-Portchannel Alternative - Cisco Nexus 1000V Series Deployment Manual

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Deployment Guide

Figure 5.

Four NICs with Two PortChannels Using vPC-HM

The main benefit of this design is that VMware VMotion does not affect the performance of virtual machine data

traffic. PortChannel 1 carries all virtual machine data, and PortChannel 2 carries VMware VMotion, the service

console, and control and packet VLANs.

Single-PortChannel Alternative

Alternatively, you can design a four-NIC solution without the use of multiple PortChannels. A single vPC-HM-based

PortChannel could be used to spread the virtual machine's load across as many NICs as possible.

The advantage of this design is the availability of all four NICs for virtual machine data traffic and the capability to

support flow-based hashing. The disadvantage, of course, is that the VMware VMotion traffic is again mingled with

data traffic and could contend for bandwidth. Figure 6 shows a design with four NICs in a single PortChannel using

vPC-HM. If flow-based hashing is used, each upstream switch will need be configured with an EtherChannel (as

shown). If source-based hashing is used, the upstream switches are not required to run EtherChannel.

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