It needs to have layer 3 support to be able to do IP hashing, as IP addressing is a layer 3 technology, so a 6200 series or higher or the soon to be released N3000 series.
I posted last month about setting up my work servers with LAG groups [URL] (I actually go to implementation this Saturday) I decided to purchase a 2808 for my home ESXi server to get more aggregated connections to my personal iSCSI Linux server but now I'm worried I might have made a mistake buying the 2808. After looking in the manual just now I realized I might have been mistakenly assuming the 2808 had STP & LACP as I can't find LACP anywhere in the PDF. I guess configuring my Linux box for 802.3ad is out (was hoping to do mode 4), so now for my home setup I'm wondering (*1*) what I should setup my VMware NIC team as and what bonding mode I should use on my Linux host? As well for the topic at the top (my work setup) (*2*) I'm not sure what to do for the route other than leave it as "Route based on originating virtual port ID"? (This is how our other datacenters are configured but I'm waiting to hear back from my network admin as to whether or not the ESXi hosts are setup with port channels on our cisco switches) For home, I want to try and increase bandwidth utilizing three nics in each server, I was hoping this will work:VMware: Route based on IP hash?w/Linux: balance-alb?--------VMware:Before you begin :   --------Linux:*Descriptions of bonding modes* +Mode 0 balance-rr: Round-robin policy: Transmit packets in sequential order from the first available slave through the last. This mode provides load balancing and fault tolerance. +Mode 1 active-backup: Active-backup policy: Only one slave in the bond is active. A different slave becomes active if, and only if, the active slave fails. The bond's MAC address is externally visible on only one port (network adapter) to avoid confusing the switch. This mode provides fault tolerance. The primary option affects the behavior of this mode. +Mode 2 balance-xor: XOR policy: Transmit based on [(source MAC address XOR'd with destination MAC address) modulo slave count]. This selects the same slave for each destination MAC address. This mode provides load balancing and fault tolerance. +Mode 3 broadcast: Broadcast policy: transmits everything on all slave interfaces. This mode provides fault tolerance. +Mode 4 802.3ad: IEEE 802.3ad Dynamic link aggregation. Creates aggregation groups that share the same speed and duplex settings. Utilizes all slaves in the active aggregator according to the 802.3ad specification. -Prerequisites: -1.Ethtool support in the base drivers for retrieving the speed and duplex of each slave. -2.A switch that supports IEEE 802.3ad Dynamic link aggregation. Most switches will require some type of configuration to enable 802.3ad mode. +Mode 5 balance-tlb: Adaptive transmit load balancing: channel bonding that does not require any special switch support. The outgoing traffic is distributed according to the current load (computed relative to the speed) on each slave. Incoming traffic is received by the current slave. If the receiving slave fails, another slave takes over the MAC address of the failed receiving slave. -Prerequisites: -1.Ethtool support in the base drivers for retrieving the speed of each slave. +Mode 6 balance-alb: Adaptive load balancing: includes balance-tlb plus receive load balancing (rlb) for IPV4 traffic, and does not require any special switch support. The receive load balancing is achieved by ARP negotiation. The bonding driver intercepts the ARP Replies sent by the local system on their way out and overwrites the source hardware address with the unique hardware address of one of the slaves in the bond such that different peers use different hardware addresses for the server.   The closest dell topic I could find of any use was: [URL] previous post was more concerned with VLAN tagging and spanning tree issues, but now I see I should have been concerned with the LAG groups there as well. Any help would be appreciated, thanks in advance all :) - PS. [URL] says the 2800 series supports LACP, so if I'm worried for nothing on my iSCSI side please slap me in the face, but I guess even then I'm still unsure how to configure the ESXi host as it doesn't support LACP without vSphere and my home setup is a free version so I don't have the vSphere web management needed to make the LACP enable changes. Not sure if this is of any use: Sample configuration of EtherChannel / Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) with ESXi/ESX and Cisco/HP switches (1004048), but this is where I was basing the choice on IP Hash from.
2808 LAG for use with VMware ESXi and Linux Bonding