Setting Automatic Link Aggregation on ESXi-facing Ports for vCenter

Currently, automatic Link Aggregation (LAG) is only supported between Arista Networks switches. With this feature, automatic Link Aggregation (LAG) includes ports between Arista Networks switches and ESXi hosts.

NetVisor OS implements LLDP and LACP to bundle the ports. Since there are no custom type-length-value (TLV) probes, NetVisor OS implements standard LLDP TLVs to uniquely identify ESXi hosts. The system description TLV is used to identify ESXi hosts and the system name is used to uniquely identify a specific ESXi host.

LACP mode is enabled and set to active on auto-lag with a fallback-option of individual to ensure that there is extra robustness in bundling and ensure that ports are bundled only if ESXi host is running LACP to avoid any data path issues.

You can enable or disable trunking towards hosts (default value is off).

Note: Starting from NetVisor OS release 3.1.0, the auto-host-bundle configuration option is no longer required for trunking with ESXi host. 

Example output from trunk-show, port-show and lldp-show.

CLI (network-admin@Leaf1) > trunk-show format trunk-id,switch,name,ports,lacp-mode,lacp-fallback,lacp-individual,status,

trunk-id name     ports lacp-mode lacp-fallback  lacp-individual status   

-------- -------- ----- --------- -------------  --------------- -----------     

129      auto-129 42,44  active    individual    none            up,PN-other       

CLI (network-admin@Leaf1) > port-show port 42,44 format all

port bezel-port status                                   rswitch rem-ip rem-mac           lport  config trunk

---- ---------- ---------------------------------------- ------- ------ ----------------- ------ ------ --------

42    42        up,PN-other,LLDP,trunk,LACP-PDUs,vlan-up 2987    ::     00:00:00:00:00:00 42     fd,10g auto-129

44    44        up,PN-other,LLDP,trunk,LACP-PDUs,vlan-up 2987    ::     00:00:00:00:00:00 44     fd,10g auto-129

CLI (network-admin@Leaf1) > lldp-show

local-port bezel-port chassis-id port-id           port-desc                          sys-name                      

---------- ---------- ---------- ----------------- ---------------------------------- ------------------------------

42         42         vmnic2     00:50:56:98:07:56 port 25 on dvSwitch DEV-CN-Tests-1 esx-dev01.pluribusnetworks.com

44         44         vmnic3     00:50:56:98:07:57 port 24 on dvSwitch DEV-CN-Tests-1 esx-dev01.pluribusnetworks.com