VMotion and NIC-Teaming for single VM?

[mike-p]

Using NI-Teaming enables the parallel VMotion of VM's.

Can a single VM take advantage of a teamed VMotion network ?

This would make sense for VM;s with large RAM configurations.

[norregaard]

I don't believe that more than one NIC can be used at a time for VMotion. Only if that NIC should fail, will one of the other NIC's in the team be activated. ESX uses outbound load balancing for the NIC team. So of one NIC is used for one VMotion, then the second VMotion will use one of the other NIC's.

[AndreTheGiant]

Can a single VM take advantage of a teamed VMotion network ?

Not easy. You have to use "Route based on IP hash" AND switches 802.3ad capably (but I'm not sure that works fine also with vmkernel ports).

Usually teaming is used for link failover and load balancing between different port.

A solution could be use the same vSwitch both for Management (that require 2 NIC for a good implementation of VMware HA) and Vmotion.

Andre

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[depping · Accepted solution]

No a single VM can never take advantage of IP HASH nic teaming because the "source ip" and "destination ip" is always the same for each ip packet.

Ken wrote a great blog article on the Teaming topic by the way: http://kensvirtualreality.wordpress.com/2009/04/05/the-great-vswitch-debate%E2%80%93part-3/

Duncan

VMware Communities User Moderator | VCP | VCDX

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[TomHowarth]

No it can not it is more akin to load balancing outbound, a 2nd NIC is used for load-balancing and resiliance.

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Tom Howarth VCP / vExpert

VMware Communities User Moderator

Blog: www.planetvm.net

Contributing author for the upcoming book "[VMware vSphere and Virtual Infrastructure Security: Securing ESX and the Virtual Environment|http://my.safaribooksonline.com/9780136083214]”. Currently available on roughcuts