Six-Nic Design Examples - Cisco Nexus 1000V Series Deployment Manual

Deployment Guide
Figure 6. Four NICs with One PortChannel Using vPC-HM

Six-NIC Design Examples

Six or more NICs provide the flexibility to use flow-based hashing and still maintain isolation between data traffic and
other traffic types. This design uses two independent PortChannels in vPC-HM, much like the four-NIC design. The
difference here is that the first PortChannel consists of four NICs that are dedicated to virtual machine data traffic.
The second PortChannel consists of the remaining two NICs, which are used for VMware VMotion traffic, the service
console, and control and packet VLANs.
This configuration could use either source- or flow-based hashing. Figure 7 shows a six-NIC example with flow-based
hashing. PortChannel 1 is in vPC-HM and consists of two NICs to each access switch. The access switches are
configured with EtherChannel. Each subgroup in PortChannel 1 consists of two NICs. PortChannel 2 is also in vPC-
HM and consists of the two NICs dedicated for VMware VMotion as well as the service console and control and
packet VLANs.
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