Hyper-V and Link Aggregation

I am running both ESXi and Hyper-V (because I cannot get Quicksync to work in a VM, I run Emby on the Hyper-V host).

In ESXi it is possible to add multiple NICs to a vSwitch so it can do a sort of link aggregation using round-robin assigments to each NIC. The VMs don't know and don't care about the multiple NICs.

Does Hyper-V do the same thing with the switch-independent link aggregation? Or do the VMs in Hyper-V have to support link aggregation for it to work?

I want the link aggregation because the ESXi box runs FreeNAS and I would like it to handle multiple streams from movies/TV stored on FreeNAS transcoded by Emby and sent out both to the Internet and to local HTPC clients.

Thanks in advance!

Assuming you are not directly assigning a physical NIC to the VM: Team the NICs on the Hyper-V host, then, assign the new team virtual adapter to a virtual switch. You can also create a team within the guest VM, but it's easier at the host level so all the guests are covered by the team.

bloodypulp said:

Assuming you are not directly assigning a physical NIC to the VM: Team the NICs on the Hyper-V host, then, assign the new team virtual adapter to a virtual switch. You can also create a team within the guest VM, but it's easier at the host level so all the guests are covered by the team.

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I am not passthroughing any of the NICs. So Hyper-V will present the VMs a single virtual NIC and use link aggregation at the host level? That's good, very much like ESXi then (although ESXi is a lot easier to set up, just drop in the NIC and attach it to the virtual switch).

Thank you!

ESXi can certainly do link aggregation, however, it can only be to a Cisco managed switch with the ports set to a port channel configuration. Other brand managed switches may be able to do it, depending in firmware and brand, but they're hit or miss. Trying to do it with an unmanaged switch just brings broadcast storms. I know this from experience.

rtangwai said:

I am not passthroughing any of the NICs. So Hyper-V will present the VMs a single virtual NIC and use link aggregation at the host level? That's good, very much like ESXi then (although ESXi is a lot easier to set up, just drop in the NIC and attach it to the virtual switch).

Thank you!

Click to expand...

What OS do you use ?
Server 2012 R2 and Server 2016 does have ability to create LACP and other types of link aggregation in the OS itself.
Server Manager -> Local Server -> NIC Teaming

sybreeder said:

What OS do you use ?
Server 2012 R2 and Server 2016 does have ability to create LACP and other types of link aggregation in the OS itself.
Server Manager -> Local Server -> NIC Teaming

Click to expand...

I am user Server 2012 R2 for Hyper-V. I have set up the teaming and it seems to be working, doesn't appear to be faster but the redundancy is definitely working (pulled ethernet cables to test).

rtangwai said:

I am user Server 2012 R2 for Hyper-V. I have set up the teaming and it seems to be working, doesn't appear to be faster but the redundancy is definitely working (pulled ethernet cables to test).

Click to expand...

It will not be faster. If you want to copy files from server to PC you can use SMB Multichannel but fior this you must have minimum 2 nics on each computer that are compatibile with RSS

sybreeder said:

It will not be faster. If you want to copy files from server to PC you can use SMB Multichannel but fior this you must have minimum 2 nics on each computer that are compatibile with RSS

Click to expand...

I was hoping it would be faster between the Hyper-V VMs and the ESXi VMs (especially FreeNAS) as they are both set up with multiple NICs, but because I'm taking the lazy way (no switch programming) it limits what can be done as out-of-order packets are a bad thing..

I know realistically that for a *REAL* increase in transfer rates I need to go 10Gbe, although I wonder if my FreeNAS pools are fast enough to keep up at that point (no SSDs).