StarWind Software

I'm sure this question was already made in the past over and over again but I cannot search in the forum so sadly i need to re-done it.

Speaking about replication links in vsan: Does two nics dedicated to replication effectly double the replication bandwith ? or it is used only for redundancy ?

eg: havind 2 1gb nics resulting in 2gbit replication speed or just 1 gbit for the active link ?

Thx

They are there only for redundancy.
StarWind VSAN does not use any form of teaming. We generally try to stay away from teaming due to possible overhead and service starting later than VSAN in Windows. I also ran into a situation where a standby adapter was doing nothing after the main adapter failure.
The only possible use of teaming in ESXi would be combining adapters of different bandwidth, e.g., 10 GBE and 1 GBE. 10 GBE is the main carrier, while 1 GBE link is there to pick up the slack after 10 GBE link failure.
That's why we recommend using two independent links if you need redundancy.

Thx for your answer.

So just using an lacp teaming and passing it as virtual interface to cvm controllers as replication link just not "transparently" load balancing the traffic on the two links ?

You are welcome.
We generally don't recommend using teaming for iSCSI and SYNC.

For iscsi i'm agree: there is multipath for failover and load balancing.
I'm just asking if for replication links the native load balancing done by a lacp works.

Thx

Replication links work in round-robin and are balanced by VSAN.

yaroslav (staff) wrote: ↑

Fri Aug 08, 2025 10:10 am

Replication links work in round-robin and are balanced by VSAN.

So you are saying that the vsan process, in presence of multiple replication links, would use ALL of them in a round robin fashion effectively doing load balancing.

Have i understood correctly ?

Thx

Yes, that's right.

yaroslav (staff) wrote: ↑

Fri Aug 08, 2025 10:29 am

Yes, that's right.

Thx very much.

You are welcome. Thanks for rising that question
p.s. have a nice weekend.