I am a firm believer on spending a good amount of time during the design phase of any deployment. Planning ahead, and knowing your limitations will make your life easier, maybe just a little bit, but every bit helps.

If you are planning on using LACP for link aggregation on vSAN, I strongly advise you to get familiar with your options, and check the Network Design guide at storagehub.vmware.com . In the Network Design Guide here you will learn about NIC teaming options, and LACP requirements such as LAG, vDS, as well as the PROs and CONs (below).

Pros and Cons of dynamic Link Aggregation/LACP (from Storagehub)

Pros

• Improves performance and bandwidth: One vSAN node or VMkernel port can communicate with many other vSAN nodes using many different load balancing options
• Network adapter redundancy: If a NIC fails and the link-state goes down, the remaining NICs in the team continue to pass traffic.
• Rebalancing of traffic after failures is fast and automatic

Cons

• Physical switch configuration: Less flexible and requires that physical switch ports be configured in a port-channel configuration.
• Complex: Introducing full physical redundancy configuration gets very complex when multiple switches are used. Implementations can become quite vendor specific.

 

In addition to this, you should also consider vSphere limitations while using LACP. Some of the limitations include:

• LACP settings not available for host profiles
• No port mirroring
• Does not work with ESXi dump collector.

For a complete list of limitations, visit VMware Docs here

Be cognizant of some “gotchas” as well. For example, restarting management agents on ESXi with vSAN/LACP using services.sh script, may cause some issues. Instead use”/etc/init.d/<module> restart” command to restart individual instances.  In essence if you use “services.sh restart” script to restart services, it will also restart the lacp daemon (/etc/init.d/lacp). See KB1003490

 

Like with any other deployment, you should consider your PROs, CONs, future plans, and environment dependencies among others.

Remember the 7Ps – Proper Prior Planning Prevents Pitiful Poor Performance