Distributed Trunking on vSphere

[kghammond]

Hello,

We have been trying to get distributed trunking working with vSphere and our HP switches.

We have the dt-lacp ports setup and we have the vswitches set to IP Hash.

On the HP switches, the ports don't show that there is a lacp member. The HP switches reported the same MAC on both ports (different switches), which we think is correct.

Also when we did this configuration and we tried to bring a vSphere box online, we received an error that HA could not be enabled.

ProCurve Switch 1(config)# trunk 23-24 trk1 lacp
ProCurve Switch 1(config)# switch-interconnect trk1
ProCurve Switch 1(config)# trunk 1 trk5 dt-lacp
ProCurve Switch 2(config)# trunk 23-24 trk1 lacp
ProCurve Switch 2(config)# switch-interconnect trk1
ProCurve Switch 2(config)# trunk 1 trk5 dt-lacp

We are trying the same thing as here:
http://www.vnephos.com/index.php/2009/09/hp-procurve-cross-stack-etherchannel/

I am not sure if we are doing something wrong, or if this simply does not work the way we expect it or what...

Thank you,
Kevin

[Mohammed Faiz]

Hi,

That looks fine, what does the output of "show lacp distributed" give?

[Joseph L. Casale]

AFAIK, vSpere doesn't support LACP?

http://vmware.com/files/pdf/technology/cisco_vmware_virtualizing_the_datacenter.pdf

I have seen it sort of work with intermittent issues untill it was set to 'Trunk'.

[kghammond]

I am waiting for our switch guru to return to get the output. I happen to be the vSphere expert at our organization.

[kghammond]

Here is our output form sh lacp distributed.

A13, A15 and A16 are our dt-lacp trunks for our vSphere test server. We have three vswitches setup in this test. A24 is a standard Windows server setup as another dt-lacp test for Windows servers using HP's NIC teaming software on a HP server.

54A# sh lacp distributed

DISTRIBUTED LACP

Local Port Status:

PORT LACP TRUNK PORT LACP LACP
NUMB ENABLED GROUP STATUS PARTNER STATUS
----- -------- ------- -------- -------- -------
A13 Active Trk113 Up No Success
A15 Active Trk115 Up No Success
A16 Active Trk116 Up No Success
A24 Active Trk124 Up Yes Success

Remote Port Status:

PORT LACP TRUNK PORT LACP LACP
NUMB ENABLED GROUP STATUS PARTNER STATUS
---- ------- ------- ------- ------- -------
A13 Active Trk113 Up No Success
A15 Active Trk115 Up No Success
A16 Active Trk116 Up No Success
A24 Active Trk124 Up Yes Success

[kghammond]

One other note, the HA agent on vSphere errors when we are using the above configuration.

Ping tests appear to work correctly when we deactivate the various distrubuted trunk ports.

[kghammond]

Antoher thought, currently our service console is not on a tagged VLAN. Do we need these to be tagged VLANâ s for dt-lacp to work correctly?

[kghammond]

We opened a support case with VMware. It turns out that we had a typo in one of the domain names for one of the servers that was causing problems with HA. It is just a coincedance that this problem crept up when we reconfigured this server to use dt-lacp.

As of right now everything appears to be working correctly. I think the fact that the LACP Partner said "No" kind of led us astray. We were expecting it to say "Yes" but I guess that makes sense since these are technically 802.3ad trunks not LACP trunks...

Thank You,
Kevin

[Domenico Viggiani]

Here:
http://www.vnephos.com/index.php/2009/09/hp-procurve-cross-stack-etherchannel/
the author says that HP Distributed Trunking works well with vSphere although HP chose to use â dt-lacpâ as the configuration parameter name and LACP is notoriously not available on vSphere.