Initial LACP Configurations with New Hosts

[L2_L3]

Good Afternoon,
I am trying to understand the best course of action when installing a new ESXi host and then planning to move it to the VDS leveraging a LACP LAG.  The migration to the VDS and all of that is really straight forward.  My questions revolve around "pre-configured" ports on a Cisco switch that are already both in the LACP bundle.  lets use one host for crude example.

Install esxi, set IPs, VLAN tag and then cable in my 10G links to my ToR switches.  Well since the host is not online yet and not part of vcenter or the VDS how would I get this host online if both uplinks were in a pre-configured LACP configuration?

Would I just cable in 1, 10G link and then set the VSS to route based on IP hash?  Then swing that interface over to the VDS and LACP?  Been thinking about this quite a bit today and curious if there is a way to achieve this without disabling half of that LACP config on the switch and making that a plain old trunked interface?  Any input would be appreciated.

[daphnissov]

In most cases, you do not need and should avoid LACP, especially when using a vDS. What is your use case for wanting this capability?

[L2_L3]

First and foremost one can only use LACP with the VDS, it is not even supported on the VSS.

My use case is unique for this particular environment and out of scope for this discussion, hope someone can chime in with an answer to my question, not my use case.  Thank you for your reply though.

[elaguni]

From my understanding, you have:

• Physical switch ports are pre-configured in an LACP bundle
• Existing vDS with LACP LAG used by ESXi hosts in a cluster

If I need to add hosts I would:

1. Configure just the management port (on the new host it will be in vSwitch0)
2. Go to existing vDS > Add and Manage hosts... > assign unused ports of the new hosts to the LACP LAG > proceed with the other steps like assigning vmkernel, IP address, etc
3. Lastly, migrate management to vDS if needed.

[a_p_]

Assuming that the final LACP configuration for the distributed virtual switch differs from the supported configuration for a standard vSwitch, I'd suggest you configure the final configuration on the physical switch, and then shutdown one of the ports until you are done with the ESXi configuration. This should allow you to access the host without issues in all setup/configuration states.

André

[L2_L3]

Thanks for your responses.

So would be ideal way to go, just connect one cable in the LACP lag to the ESXi host, which is a standard switch as its a fresh install.  Change route based on orig port ID to route based on ip hash, tag my MGMT vlan and then I should have connectivity in theory.

Reason I ask, my steps were the same as above, just cabled one link in the LACP bundle in, TAG my management network, and then I had no L3 connectivity on the 10G link.  I had to use a 1G cable on an access port to swing it over to the VDS and get it online, trying to avoid this.  Guess my question, a single 10G uplink on the standard switch, to establish network connectivity do I have to be using route based on IP hash?