Rickard Nobel schrieb:
STP is good to have, and if you are using HP Procurve devices it will default to the newer and much fast Rapid Spanning Tree. However, even as RSTP in my opinion is very good to keep the network overall in a robust state it is actually not needed for the ESXi network redundancy.
If you make sure you use the default NIC teaming policy on your vSwitch ("port id") you could actually connect a single vSwitch to two physical switches which connects to a core switch, and not getting any layer two loops. If wanted I can explain the exact workings of this, but the short answer is that as long as you keep the default NIC teaming settings you will not create any loops and you do not have to configure Spanning Tree for that reason (but is good for other purposes).
Okay, that is clear. But what if I connect the two swtiches with each other? Then there are two ways for Switch A to reach Switch B, direct and via core switch. Isn't there a loop? I though it is necessary to connect the two swtiches with each other (perhaps twice with LACP) because of performance reason, isn't it?