VMTN Blog

Beaconing is one of those features that often confuses even the most experienced networking admin.

Shudong Zhou, one of our senior engineers, recently posted an entry on the internal blog explaining how it works and how you might use it. He gave me permission to cut and paste his entry. Here it is …

Beaconing is a software solution for detecting link failures downstream from the physical switch.ESX provides a simple and elegant teaming solution. All uplinks connected to a vswitch are assumed to connect to the same physical network (same broadcast domain) so they are all equivalent. Users can configure a list of active and standby uplinks for traffic to go out of the ESX host. If a link fails, the adapter driver detects it and marks the uplink as failed and stops using this uplink. Existing traffic will fail over to a standby uplink or redistributed to the remaining team members.

Link: VMware: VMware Networking Blog: 10GigE Networking Performance with ESX 3.5.

1. Improving managability by reducing the cable and NIC sprawl. 2x 10GigE links versus 6, 8, 10 or more 1 GigE can simplify your infrastructure
2. Convergence of Fibre Channel and Network traffic using FCoE (Fibre
   Channel over Ethernet). The ability to do away with Fibre Channel HBAs
   and converge the FC SAN traffic with the ethernet network traffic is
   the TCO tipping point for some customers. ...

But, ...how does 10GigE perform on ESX 3.5? Our performance team published a paper this week on that very theme.