I've seen a couple of topics on this already posted, some from days past, but I'm unable to get my systems to work the way I prefer. Let me start out by saying that I'm not a network genius, but I am very familiar with VMware itself. In my past lives, I simply asked for an EtherChannel trunk of X# of VLANs and I tagged on the vSwitch. However, due to the cost of Cisco gear, a new HP BladeCenter c3000 was purchased with GbE2c Layer 2/3 Ethernet Blade Switches and a bunch of us here can't figure out the best way to configure them. I'm hoping somebody here has experience in this realm.
Existing Configuration
Cisco 6509 <=== dual 1Gbps Ethernet w/ LACP (active) ===> HP GbE2c Blade Switch <=== Multiple VLAN Configs ===> Blade (i.e. Bay 5)
Problem
Every time a new VLAN is added to the trunk, we have to touch every single HP switch to add the VLAN manually. Takes forever to push out new VLANs. Also, it's expected we are getting aggregate throughput that I don't think is working without HP Trunk groups (according to my reading). I could be wrong though.
Desire
Configure the HP switch so that it passes the entire trunk contents up to the ESXi host and only configure port groups / VLAN tags at the dvSwitch. Thus whenever the trunk definition changes, all that is needed in ESX is to create the new dvPortGroup. Also, they expect bandwidth aggregation among uplinks in the dvSwitch.
Is there any way to attain this configuration? Hosts are running ESXi 4.1.
P.S. I'm keeping it simple right now, ultimately I may extend this to 10G ethernet and four or more uplinks per dvSwitch.