Posts Tagged ‘Networking’
vSphere over Hyper-V: built-in NIC teaming support for any NIC with easy set up directly from vSphere Client
Protecting your VMs from NIC failure is really easy with vSphere. Any edition of vSphere (even free ESXi for that matter) provides built-in NIC teaming capabilities which can be easily configured in just few clicks directly from vSphere Client.
NIC teaming policies can be set for any of the supported networking cards (over 450 models) and allow users to configure multiple active and standby adapters. Teaming configurations can vary per port groups on the same virtual switch and uplinks.
Microsoft Hyper-V R2 will still not have integrated NIC teaming, instead relying on third-party NIC drivers to provide the functionality. The issues with the third-party approach are: 1) the drivers only work with NICs from that same third-party, 2) it requires a separate installation (and often other crazy stuff as vCritical showed in this blog post), and 3) it is unclear whether Microsoft or the third-party provides support should an issue arise.
Managing NIC teaming Hyper-V servers can quickly become a painful and time consuming activity. Besides having to install third-party drivers on each server, teaming will have to configured and managed locally on each server using the third-party management tool (like the HP Network Configuration Utility in the image below) that is not aware of your virtual switch configurations.
This is if you decide to enable Hyper-V on a full Windows Server 2008 installation, bringing the over 10GB of bloated Windows code base and all its security and patching related pains in your virtualization stack. Should you instead decide to follow Microsoft’s recommendation and enable the Hyper-V role on Windows Server 2008 Server Core deployment or use Hyper-V Server (i.e. Windows Server 2008 Server Core with Hyper-V enabled) in an attempt to reduce that code base to “just” 3-4GB, well, make sure to cancel your dinner plans and allocate few more hours to setup teaming via command line!… but, hey, that’s the “Windows you know”.
Built-in NIC teaming isn’t the only aspect that vSphere does better than Hyper-V when it comes to networking management. Directly from the vSphere Client users can also set up policies for networking load balancing, layer-2 security and networking traffic shaping.
|
VMware vSphere 4 |
Microsoft Hyper-V R2 with SC |
|
| Integrated native support for active/active and active/passive NIC teaming |
Yes |
No |
| Integrated native support for NIC traffic load balancing policies (originating virtual port ID, IP hash, source MAC hash) |
Yes |
No |
| Integrated native support for network failover detection based on Link Status and Beacon Probing |
Yes |
No |
| Integrated native support for layer-2 (data link) networking security policies (Promiscuous Mode, MAC address change, Forged Transmit) |
Yes |
No |
| Integrated native support for switch outbound traffic shaping at the port level (average bandwidth, peak bandwidth, burst size) |
Yes |
No |
| Simplify port configuration by utilizing Port Groups across multiple virtual ports. The Port Group specifies all information needed to enable a port: NIC teaming policy, VLAN tagging, Layer 2 security, and traffic shaping. |
Yes |
No |
| Discover and advertise physical and virtual network configurations for better debugging and monitoring of Cisco-based environments from within vCenter Server |
Yes |
No |
Michael Hong
ehorschman
kmontakhab
tstephan
Alberto