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Cacti, easy going

A decent management server is very important in a network, at least that is my opinion. The most important aspect of a management server is its user friendliness. Our customers are most of the time busy with their own problems and the problems of end users, which include all kind of (silly) problems. So the most of them don’t have a lot of time to spend on configuring a management server.

That is why I like Cacti and especially CactiEZ. CactiEZ is a software appliance, which is up and running in half an hour. After that you just add some devices and you can generate some nice bandwidth statistics with the help of RRDTool. I have also seen a lot of other management servers, like Nagios, HP OpenView and Cisco Works, but the most of them are hard to configure and end up as mp3 player…..

When I configure a management server only for network components like switches, routers and/or firewalls, I always use CactiEZ. It is easy to install and gives me all the things I need. The most important options of Cacti for me are: bandwidth statistics, syslog messages, flow view, mac tracking, reporting and so one. Especially if you combine Cacti(EZ) with SwitchMap, you have a nice, easy to use and robust management server for your network.

Port-channel Cisco vs. VMware ESX

I have had different discussions with different customers about the load-balancing algorithms between a Cisco switch, configured with a port-channel and a VMware ESX server using multiple NICs. Our VMware consultants always choose Route based on IP hashes as load-balancing algorithm. This means that load-balancing happens on layer 3 of the OSI model (source-destination-IP).

In my opinion, the switch should be configured the same way. Depending on the model switch, you can have different default load-balancing algoritmhs. For example, the Cisco Catalyst 3750 uses src-mac load-balancing and the Cisco Catalyst 6500 use src-dst-ip load-balancing. You can check the configured load-balancing algorithm with the following command:

show etherchannel load-balancing

If you would like you change the load-balancing algorithm you can use the global configuration command:

port-channel load-balancing <option>

Be aware that this is a global configuration command, so it affects all the configured port-channels on the switch.

To check the load-balancing between the different NICs, you should have a tool to look at real-time bandwidth statistics. I normally use the tool SNMP Traffic Grapher to monitor the different switch ports. On the ESX console you can check the load-balancing with the commands:

1. esxtop [enter]
2. s2 (schedule interval of 2 seconds) [enter]
3. n [network]

The load should be spread fairly even across the different switch ports en vmnics.