Nexus 1000v Port Channel to Virtual Machine

Question

Is it possible to setup a Port-Channel between a Nexus 1000v Switch and a ESX Virtual Machine?

Context: I am running a Checkpoint Firewall cluster as Virtual Machines on an ESX server. I want to configure a Bond interface on the Firewall cluster that forms a port-channel with the Nexus 1000v running on the same ESX server.

I've found plenty of guides for configuring Port-Channels between the Nexus 1000v and external switches, but nothing for forming a port-channel with VM's.

Any help appreciated!

Answer 1

No - the 1000V has templates for forming LACP connections to upstream switches via physical NIC's on hosts but not on virtual interfaces to VM's.

The notion of bonding implies that load can be spread across multiple physical resources (i.e actual NIC's) that correspond to multiple physical ports on one or more actual switches. In the case of a vnic the connection is purely a software construct between the VM and the VEM on the hypervisor. There's no hard limit on performance and, similarly, no assurance that bonding several of these constructs together will do anything more than add overhead to precisely the same core that would be processing the queue for a single interface.