So I'm trying to cross connect my physical ESXi hosts with 40GbE direct connect cables because that's the only way I can get 40GbE.... (and I don't want to pay data center to host a 1U switch that would be only 1GbE or 10GbE max anyway). I do know that VMware only officially supports 2 node direct connect -- so trying to figure out an unspported way to do this.
Should something like the following drawing work? Right now, it doesn't seem like I have active-active working on ESXi 1.... only one of the links seems to work at a time. Tryhing to figure out if there is some port isolation going on, failover settings I have not properly adjusted, etc.
As these are "virtual switches" after all, shouldn't this work? I'm no networking expert but I think you could connect physical switches together just fine like this. I can install RouterOS or PFSense and setup a switch that way but I'd rather not have to worry about those systems since this seems like basic switching and vSphere should handle it.
Or should I go ahead with RouterOS etc? (or is NSX-T an option? Seems like it woudl be a bloated solution for my needs)
RouterOS's VRRP may work great and provide some resilience... just setup primary/failover routers on 2 of 3 (or 4) nodes and let them handle switching. I just don't want to introduce complexity into the system if there is a way to handle it within VMware.
The blue lines here are my 40GbE links.....
Should something like the following drawing work? Right now, it doesn't seem like I have active-active working on ESXi 1.... only one of the links seems to work at a time. Tryhing to figure out if there is some port isolation going on, failover settings I have not properly adjusted, etc.
As these are "virtual switches" after all, shouldn't this work? I'm no networking expert but I think you could connect physical switches together just fine like this. I can install RouterOS or PFSense and setup a switch that way but I'd rather not have to worry about those systems since this seems like basic switching and vSphere should handle it.
Or should I go ahead with RouterOS etc? (or is NSX-T an option? Seems like it woudl be a bloated solution for my needs)
RouterOS's VRRP may work great and provide some resilience... just setup primary/failover routers on 2 of 3 (or 4) nodes and let them handle switching. I just don't want to introduce complexity into the system if there is a way to handle it within VMware.
The blue lines here are my 40GbE links.....