How to Team network cards in VMware esxi 5.0

[chriswu11111]

Hi All,

I'm new to vmware and this forum please forgive me if i have put the request in the wrong area.

My lack of vmware knowledge has brought me here to ask for help and thank you in advance for any advice i recieve.

Please see attached picture for more details.

As you can see in my picture i have put 3 nic cards for my virtual switch (network switch R710). I am looking to put all the servers I virtualise onto that virtual switch. I would like to make use of the 3 nic cards to increase the bandwidth i use for the servers and allow for load balancing on the three cards.

I have as you can see put the three nic cards together for that switch and also clicked on load balancing on it.

The following is what i would like to do:

The 3 nics will all have separate ip's lets say for argument sake 192.168.55.1 to .3. Now i would like all three to have a shared address as .4 so it will appear on DNS as .4 rather than .1 and .2 and .3

Is there anyway you can do that in vmware or am i going to have to have 3 entries in DNS for the same esxi server as 3 separate ip addresses.

thanks for your help guys!

[RazvanVladVCP]

Hi,

You assign IP addresses only to virtual adapters, not a vmnic directly.

You can define 1 or more virtual adapters on one virtual switch. You can have 1 virtual adapter for traffic management, 1 for vmotion, 1 for secondary traffic management, 1 for iSCSI for example. You can balance a virtual adapter to all 3 vmnics just like you defined the switch.

Thank you,

Razvan

[chriswu11111]

Hi,

Thank you for your response.

I don't quite understand what you mean. Sorry about that. If you have any step by step that would be great.

When i plug in all three physical cables into the 3 nics i get 3 differenet ip addresses from my dhcp server e.g. 192.168.55.1, 2 and 3.

In the vmware picture i attached previously i have clicked on nic teaming and load balancing between the 3 nics.

These 3 nics will be used by all virtual machines for better bandwidth.

Now that the 3 physical nic cards have 3 separate addresses is there anywhere VMware can group the nic ip addresses as one e.g. 192.168.55.4

[RazvanVladVCP]

Hi,

Here is the official documentation related to networking. I think you will understand better if you read it with attention:

http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/index.jsp?topic=/com.vmware.vsphere.networking.doc_50/GUID-35B40B0...

And the link specifically for network teaming:

http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/index.jsp?topic=/com.vmware.wssdk.pg.doc_50/PG_Ch9_Networking.11.7...

Thanks,

Razvan

[gerdesj]

This is quite a big subject ...

Create a single vSwitch and add the three NICs to it.  In the NIC Teaming, set all three NICs to list under Active Adapters.  Make sure that a VMKernel port with the IP address is on that vSwitch and that there is a port group for the VMs to attach to.

At the end of this you should have a single vSwitch which displays three items in its Ports tab.

Now to actually make use of the three NICs you need to also put in support at the physical switch end.  This is in the form of a Link Aggregation Group.  You will have to match up the Load Balancing algorithm (Route based on the ...) between the physical switch that the NICs are plugged into and that used in ESX.  If I recall correctly ESXi does not support LACP.

As you "only" have three NICs to play with, doing the above will probably involve some loss of communication for a short while so be carefull if this is a live system.  Another option is to keep one NIC just for the VMKernel port and then bond the other two NICs.  This will involve two vSwitches, noting that the vSwitch for the VMs will not actually have an IP address associated with it.  This is fine.  With this configuration, you will lose management network redundancy but it will mean that you won't lose comms with the ESXi whilst playing with the bonding.

If you are using iSCSI in any way then I do not recommend you do the above. Get some more NICs if you want to do the job properly!

There are many forum and blog postings around the internet and VMWare has a mass of documentation on this.

Best of luck

Cheers

Jon

[BharatR]

Hi

Here is the article for http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1004088 Configuring Nic Teaming

check in the link for configuring netwoking http://www.simple-talk.com/sysadmin/virtualization/vmware-lab-setup---a-virtualized-lab-for-testing-...

[UmeshAhuja]

Hi,

I think below link will help you out about NIC teaming at Hardware level and VMWare level.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?cmd=displayKC&externalId=1004048

[weinstein5]

IP addresses do not get assigned to phyaical NICs in an ESXi server they are assign to the virtual NICs in the VMsor the virtual vmkernel ports of the ESXi host -  so each virtual machine will have its own unique IP address and what you will end up with is a DNS entry for each virtual machine that the ESXi host will have running on it -

The NIC teaming referred to in you attach image is not NIC teaming in the true sense of the word it is nore a load ditribution baded on NIC Teaming policy selected -

1. The default - Route based on Virtual Port ID - a physical NIC will be selected based on the virtual port ID when the interface (either a VMs virtual nic or vmkernel port) comes on line and the physical NIC port is selectd in a round robin fashion once a physical NIC is sellected that is the only port the traffic will go out.
   
2. Route based on MAC Address - a physical NIC is selected based on the virtual MAC address of the virtual NIC or vmkernel port
   
3. Route based on IP Hash - a physical NIC  is selected based on the originating IP address and destination IP address for out bound traffic - so you can see this has the highest probability of distributing the outbound traffic across all NICs attached to the virtual switch - this will require the physical switch connected to the physical nics are connected to be configured for 802.3ad Link Aggregation -