NFS with IP Hash Load Balancing

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

This article provides information about IP Hash Load Balancing support with NFS.

Environment

VMware ESX Server 3.0.x
VMware vSphere ESXi 5.1
VMware ESXi 4.0.x Embedded
VMware vSphere ESXi 5.0
VMware ESXi 4.1.x Embedded
VMware ESX Server 3.5.x
VMware ESXi 3.5.x Embedded
VMware ESXi 4.0.x Installable
VMware ESX 4.0.x
VMware ESX 4.1.x
VMware ESXi 4.1.x Installable
VMware ESXi 3.5.x Installable

Resolution

IP Hash Load Balancing is supported for any IP connection with multiple initiators and multiple targets. IP Hash chooses a physical NIC uplink based on a hash of the source and destination IP addresses for each packet. If a single IP address pair exists for the source and destination of all traffic, the traffic will only utilize a single physical uplink. Failover functionality between multiple physical NIC uplinks will still be available.

For more information on NIC Teaming and IP Hash Load Balancing, see the vSphere 5.1 Networking Guide.

One way to establish multiple IP targets on the NFS store is to configure virtual interfaces (eg, Multimode VIF) or etherchannel. Multiple IP addresses on the NFS store can be configured to provide different datastores, thus taking advantage of IP Hash Load Balancing.

For more information on Multimode/VIF and NFS, see the NetApp and Bea article (requires NetApp login), IP43 Building Virtual Infrastructures with NAS.

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Note: The preceding link was correct as of August 16th, 2013. If you find the link is broken, provide feedback and a VMware employee will update the link.

Additional Information

For more information on determining which physical NIC uplink is selected, see Troubleshooting IP-Hash outbound NIC selection (1007371).

For Software iSCSI, it is preferred to use native SCSI MPIO instead of network link aggregation. For more information, see the Configuring iSCSI Initiators and Storage in the vSphere iSCSI SAN Configuration Guide.