Exam NCS-Core Topic 1 Question 171 Discussion

In a situation where traffic is not being balanced across the physical NICs and the Top-of-Rack (ToR) switches have been configured with LACP (Link Aggregation Control Protocol), the appropriate AHV network configuration to resolve this issue within Prism Element is "Active-Active." This setting enables both NICs to actively handle traffic, which, combined with LACP, allows for load balancing and redundancy, effectively utilizing all available network paths. This setup ensures that traffic is spread evenly across the physical NICs, maximizing network throughput and resilience.
References:
* Nutanix Prism User Guide
* Nutanix AHV Administration Guide
In a scenario where a new AHV cluster is installed and the traffic is not being balanced across the physical NICs despite the ToR switches being configured with LACP, the appropriate network option to set within Prism Element is Active-Active. This configuration allows for a traffic-hashing algorithm, such as balance-TCP, to split traffic between multiple links in an active-active fashion. Since the uplinks appear as a single L2 link, the algorithm can balance the traffic among bond members without any regard for switch MAC address tables1.
References:
* Nutanix Community: AHV Networking | Enable, Disable and Verify LACP1
* Nutanix Support & Insights: Layer 2 Network Management2
* Nutanix Support & Insights: Enabling LAG and LACP on the ToR Switch (AHV Only)