How to configure NIC teaming in ESXi and ESX

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

This article provides information on NIC teaming, its advantages, choosing the appropriate NIC Teaming policy, and the process to configure.

A NIC team can share the load of traffic between physical and virtual networks among some or all of its members, as well as provide passive failover in the event of a hardware failure or network outage.

Environment

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Resolution

Advantages of NIC Teaming:

To utilize NIC teaming, two or more network adapters must be uplinked to a virtual switch. The main advantages of NIC teaming are:

• Increased network capacity for the virtual switch hosting the team.
• Passive failover in the event one of the adapters in the team goes down.

Guidelines while choosing NIC Teaming policy:

Observe these guidelines to choose the correct NIC Teaming policy:

• Route based on the originating port ID: Choose an uplink based on the virtual port where the traffic entered the virtual switch.
• Route based on an IP hash: Choose an uplink based on a hash of the source and destination IP addresses of each packet. For non-IP packets, whatever is at those offsets is used to compute the hash.
• Route based on a source MAC hash: Choose an uplink based on a hash of the source Ethernet.
• Use explicit failover order: Always use the highest order uplink from the list of Active adapters which passes failover detection criteria.
• Route based on physical NIC load (Only available on Distributed Switch): Choose an uplink based on the current loads of physical NICs.

Before you begin :

• The default load balancing policy is Route based on the originating virtual port ID. If the physical switch is using link aggregation, Route based on IP hash load balancing must be used. For more information, see Host requirements for link aggregation (etherchannel, port channel, or LACP) in ESXi and the vSphere Networking guide.

• LACP support was introduced in vSphere 5.1 on distributed vSwitches and requires additional configuration. For more information, see Configuring a LAG on a vSphere Distributed Switch Port Group when using LACP

• Ensure VLAN and link aggregation protocol (if any) are configured correctly on the physical switch ports.

Configuring NIC teaming:

• For standard vSwitch using the vCenter client
• For Distributed portgroup for VMware vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS) using the vSphere/VMware Infrastructure Client

Process to configure NIC teaming for Virtual Standard Switch (vSS) using the vCenter client:

1. Highlight the host and click the Configure tab.
2. Click the Virtual Switches link.
3. Select the virtual switch then select Edit.  
4. Under the Teaming and Failover tab, select the appropriate drop down for Load Balancing.
5. Ensure the appropriate network adapter(s) are set to active.  Use the arrow to move the adapter(s) to Active Adapters if necessary.
6. Save by clicking OK.
7. Test the load balancing by adding a test VM to the port group and ensure the VM can ping its gateway.

Process to configure NIC teaming for Distributed port group for VMware vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS) using the vSphere/VMware Infrastructure Client:

1. From Inventory, go to Networking.
2. Click on the Distributed switch.
3. Click the Configure tab then the Topology option.
4. Click on the port group's additional options and Edit Settings. 
5. Click Teaming and Failover.
6. Select the correct Teaming policy under the Load Balancing field.
7. Click OK.
8. Test the load balancing by adding a test VM to the port group and ensure the VM can ping its gateway.

NOTE: If the VM cannot reach its default gateway, please see Troubleshooting virtual machine default gateway connection issues for more troubleshooting steps.

Additional Information

For more information, see:

• Configure Virtual Switch with an EtherChannel (or port channel)
• What is beacon probing?