sofakng wrote:
QUESTION: What's the difference between using NIC teaming (LAG group) and just assigning the two physical NICs to my vSwitch and NOT setting up the teaming/LAG group?
The difference is that with IP Hash together with static LAG you could get a higher potential throughput for a single VM. With default NIC Teaming Policy Port ID you could never get more bandwidth to a single VM than one physical NIC could give you, but with IP Hash you could under some conditions use both your cards at the same time. This depends mainly how many clients are accessing this VM.
The only "strange" thing I'm doing is that I'm using an "all in one" ESXi box where the ESXi host is also my NFS file server. More specifically, I have RAID cards passed through to a VM. This VM hosts NFS storage where my other VMs are stored. Therefore, I must power up my file server VM and once it is powered on, I can then access my other VMs hosted on it's NFS storage. Does that make sense?
Do you have other clients accessing this NFS server as well, except VMs inside this ESXi?
If not, are there some very specific features of this NFS server that you need?
If not, it could be a lot of extra unneeded overhead in this setup, since you could otherwise just store the VMDK files on a local datastore and have the vmkernel manage all disk access. Now you probably need to go through your physical switch for each disk read/write (depends on how your NFS and VMkernel IP are setup.)