FreeNAS in ESXi - dual gigbit NIC bonding?

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Hi all,

I have setup a FreeNAS in my ESXi host with 2 physical gigabit NICs both set to active. I've tried to add 2 virtual NICs to the FreeNas VM but they only work in independent mode, getting 2 IP addresses. Everything works and I can hit the webgui through either IPs.
I've attempted to setup Link Aggregation on FreeNAS using load-balancing (no LACP since I don't have a switch that supports that) but no matter how I set it up, as soon as I bond the 2 NICs and reboot the system no longer gets DHCP addresses. The bonded link shows nothing and even when I force set it to a static address it doesn't fix things and it can't ping other systems and vice versa.

I was under the impression that only 802.3ad (LACP) required managed switches to function so I choose load-balancing. Any ideas?
 

jgreco

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I think the question you should be asking is whether or not ESXi's internal software ethernet switch will cope with that. My guess - based mostly on your observation that it doesn't work - is that it doesn't, at least not the way you have it configured.

There aren't that many knobs to twiddle for the free ESXi switch. I vaguely recall that there are options for ingress filtering of some types of traffic, but none of it is very sophisticated. If you can't figure it out, I might be able to try to set something up later.
 
Joined
Sep 20, 2011
Messages
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I think the question you should be asking is whether or not ESXi's internal software ethernet switch will cope with that. My guess - based mostly on your observation that it doesn't work - is that it doesn't, at least not the way you have it configured.

There aren't that many knobs to twiddle for the free ESXi switch. I vaguely recall that there are options for ingress filtering of some types of traffic, but none of it is very sophisticated. If you can't figure it out, I might be able to try to set something up later.

I did research on it and the VSwitch does support bonding, I've actually switched to a TurnKey Ubuntu server as I found out RAID-Z will not allow geometry changes to the array so I'll go back to a good old fashioned RAID6 setup. The Ubuntu server's bonding worked withe out a hitch so it seems something is still wrong in the FreeNAS 8.0.1RC2 build especially given the other threads I've read discussing the issues with it
 
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