Migrating Management Traffic to High Bandwidth Uplinks on vSphere Distributed Switch to Prevent Saturation

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Management traffic on the vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS) is saturating the assigned 1GbE uplink (Uplink 1). Network utilization metrics confirm the 1GbE interface is being saturated by the current traffic load, creating a hardware-level bottleneck. The requirement is to migrate this traffic to the available 25GbE physical adapters (Uplink 2 and Uplink 4) to resolve the bandwidth saturation and prevent potential packet drops.

Environment

VMware vSphere vcenter 

VMware vSphere ESXI 

Cause

The active uplink assigned to handle the management traffic is backed by a 1GbE physical adapter, which possesses insufficient bandwidth to process the current traffic volume.

Resolution

 

1. Create a new distributed port group on the VDS.

2. Configure the new port group with identical VLAN, security, and traffic shaping settings as the existing management port group.

3. Modify the Teaming and Failover policy on the newly created port group: set the 25GbE uplinks (Uplink 2 and Uplink 4) to Active, and set Uplink 1 to Unused.

4. Navigate to the host configuration and migrate the management vmkernel port from the original port group to the newly created distributed port group.

 

Additional Information

Migrate Virtual Machines (VMs) and VMkernel Adapters from Distributed Switch (vDS) to Standard Switch (vSS)