Migrating to LAG (LACP) Setup with unRAID VM w/ESXi

[joelones]

I'm currently on ESXi 6.5 (free) and I'm running unRAID on a single physical adapter, like I've been doing for many years now. This unRAID VM has two Virtual NICs: one for untagged traffic and another Virtual NIC on a VLAN for specific dockers. Everything works fine.

 

I will soon have another adapter (making 2 in total on the box) which I'd like to use in a LAG configuration. My question, how would one proceed to do this and would I still be able to maintain my currently setup with this? In other words (not sure if the terminology is right here), I'd create a LAG with two physical NICs and then a vSwitch and use it no differently than a single physical adapter? VLANs would still work and all?

 

Also, I notice that the free version of ESXi does static LAG and not LACP. From what I understand LACP is really for failover, right? But both do increase bandwidth?

 

Last question, if I get the paid license for ESXi, would I be able to manage a distributed vSwitch (w/ LACP) via the html5 interface with vCenter? I don't see the option on vSphere?

 

Apologies if this seems more like an ESXi question than unRAID (I've already asked on the ESXi forums), perhaps they're some network ESXi gurus out there...

[uldise]

i used some LAG on my free ESXi server some time ago with 4port Gigabit network adapter. keep in mind that you cant exceed 1Gbit for any single connection in ESXi, but, if you have multiple VMs, then each VM can use separate NIC, so it work just in parallel. For now, i'm on 10Gbit network on my ESXi..