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An administrator is building a new vSphere Standard Switch with two active uplinks. The physical switch ports for these uplinks are placed in an etherchannel.
Which load balancing policy should the administrator use to support the etherchannel configuration?
A. Route based on IP hash
B. Route based on the originating virtual port
C. Route based on source MAC hash
D. Route based on physical NIC load
Correct Answer: A
Explanation/Reference:
Explanation:
IP hash-based load balancing makes use of the source and destination of the IP address to decide which physical network card to use. Making use of this algorithm allows a VM to communicate via various physical network cards based on its destination. This option requires configuration of the physical switch’s ports to EtherChannel. Since the physical switch is configured in the same way, this option is the only one that also provides inbound load distribution, where the distribution is not necessarily balanced.
Incorrect Answers:
B: Using this configuration policy means a virtual network card connected to a vSwitch port will always use the same physical network card. It does not support the etherchannel configuration.
C: This policy is similar to the default policy, except that the policy is based on the number of MAC addresses. It does not support the etherchannel configuration.
D: This policy, also called Load Based Teaming (LBT), maps vNICs to pNICs and remaps the vNIC to pNIC affiliation if the load exceeds specific thresholds on a pNIC. It does not support the etherchannel configuration.
References:
Sarkar, Prasenjit, vSphere High Performance Cookbook, Packt Publishing, Birmingham, 2013, pp 66-72